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BR  121  .R55  1912 
Roberts,  Richard,  1874- 
The  renascence  of  faith 


THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 


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Renascence  of  Faith 


BY 


RICHARD    ROBERTS 


WITH    AN    INTRODUCTION 


G.  A.  JOHNSTON   ROSS 


New  York         Chicago         Toronto 

Fleming   H.  Revell   Company 

London  and  Edinburgh 


Copyright,  1912,  by 
FLEMING  H.  REVELL  COMPANY 


New  York:  158  Fifth  Avenue 
Chicago:  125  N.  Wabash  Ave. 
Toronto:  25  Richmond  St.,  W. 
London:  21  Paternoster  Square 
Edinburgh:   100  Princes  Street 


INTRODUCTION 

THE  militant  moral  life  of  the  age  we  live  in  is 
anxious  and  self-conscious  and  self-reviewing 
to  the  point  of  indecency.  We  have  been 
made  aware,  with  an  exasperating  clearness,  of  things 
as  they  ought  to  be;  and  have  become  perhaps  still 
more  painfully  aware  of  our  comparative  powerless- 
ness  in  the  face  of  things  as  they  are.  The  fight 
against  wrong  roars  on  around  us  on  every  side; 
with  every  possible  aspect,  from  the  exciting  hope 
of  real  success  to  the  most  obvious  and  depressing 
impotence  and  failure.  Panting  in  the  smoke  of  the 
battle  whose  far  sweep  we  cannot  see,  we  call  out 
for  news  of  the  fight  as  a  whole:  "Watchman,  what 
of  the  night?" 

In  this  book  a  manly  effort  is  made  to  respond  to 
that  call,  and  to  make  report  of  the  situation,  its  anx- 
ious aspects,  and  its  hope. 

It  is  an  honor  to  introduce  my  friend  Richard 
Roberts,  of  Crouch  Hill  Presbyterian  Church,  London, 
to  the  American  reading  public,  and  to  be  allowed  to 
recall  some  facts  which  show  that  he  has  a  right  to 
be  heard.  In  England  he  is  fast  making  for  himself 
an  indelible  name  as  an  energetic  leader  in  the  interests 
of  the  Kingdom  of  God.  Born  some  forty  odd  years 
ago  in  Wales,  and  dedicated  to  the  holy  ministry,  Mr. 

3 


4  INTRODUCTION 

Roberts  early  won  his  spurs  in  a  memorable  forward 
movement  of  the  Welsh  Churches.  Drawn  into  the 
vortex  of  London  while  yet  little  more  than  a  stripling, 
he  took  his  place  from  the  first  as  an  exponent  of 
public  questions,  gaining  the  startled  admiration  of  the 
Prime  Minister  of  England  by  a  deliverance  upon  the 
subject  of  Education  characterized  by  Mr.  Asquith  as 
one  of  the  most  statesmanlike  utterances  he  had  ever 
heard.  Carrying  the  heavy  burden  of  a  great  metro- 
politan pastorate,  Mr.  Roberts  has  found  time  for  a 
varied  leadership  in  political  and  ecclesiastical  life;  he 
is  an  acknowledged  expert  in  Sunday  School  reform, 
and  has  been  elected  President  of  the  Metropolitan 
Council  of  Evangelical  Free  Churches. 

If  then  Mr,  Roberts  passes  in  review  the  various 
aspects  of  the  Holy  War,  he  does  so  not  as  spectator 
only;  he  is  combatant  as  well.  The  passion  of  the 
battle  is  in  the  report  he  makes.  He  has  listened  and 
watched  while  he  has  been  fighting.  Living  right  in 
the  centre  of  the  most  turbulent  current  of  thought 
and  life,  he  has  been  alert  to  every  sound  ominous  and 
hopeful;  he  has  observed  fearlessly  and  impartially 
and  he  speaks  with  decision  and  authority. 

He  knows  the  dangers  of  the  survey  he  has  made. 
"  It  is  the  easiest  task  in  the  world,"  he  says,  "  to 
formulate  an  indictment  of  one's  own  time:  it  is  also 
one  of  the  most  perilous."  Mr.  Roberts  would  be  the 
last  to  affirm  that  he  has  wholly  escaped  the  perils  that 
are  incidental  to  widely  sweeping  critical  review.  But 
1  whoever  reads  this  book  carefully  will  find  himself  in 
possession  of  an  instructive  estimate  of  the  forces 
making  for  and  against  righteousness  in  our  time: 


INTRODUCTION  5 

and  he  will  forgive  the  author's  range  of  denunciation  } 
for  the  sake  of  the  bracing  effect  of  his  tense  and  \ 
driving  earnestness.  \ 

The  style  alone  insures  the  reader  against  tedium. 
Mr.  Roberts  writes  with  the  vivacious,  surging  fluency 
of  the  bilingual  Celt,  and  there  are  phrases  on  almost 
every  page  that  startle  by  their  quick  whipping  of 
sound  into  the  service  of  sense.  Who,  for  example, 
is  likely  to  forget  the  sticky  vividness  of  the  remark 
that  the  machinery  of  the  Church  is  "  clogged  by  a 
glut  of  unutilized  grace"? 

But  while  the  style  attracts  and  pleases,  it  is  the 
range  of  view  and  sustained  intensity  of  purpose  that 
make  the  book's  impressiveness;  and  the  very  frankness 
and  daring  of  Mr.  Roberts'  trenchant  criticism  of  the  | 
institutional    forms    in    which    for   the    moment    the  i 
Church  is  clothed  will  help  the  reader  to  share  the; 
author's  burning  conviction  that  despite  all  failure,  a ' 
genuine  renascence  of  faith  has  begun  and  a  brighter 
day    for   the    world    is    dawning.     The   book    is    an 
astringent  tonic. 

G.  A.  Johnston  Ross. 
New  York. 


CONTENTS 


Preface 


PART  I 
THE   AVERAGE   MAN 

CHAPTER 

I.  The  Man  Himself 

II.  The  Eclipse  of  God   . 

III.  The  Eclipse  of  the  Other  Man 

IV,  The  Blight  of  Shallowness     . 
V.  The  Dismemberment  of  Life 

VI.     The  Evil  Seed     .... 


13 

31 

34 
43 
51 

57 


PART  II 

THE   WILDERNESS 

VII.     The  Voice  in  the  Wilderness          .         .  67 

VIII.     The  Tyranny  of  Things  ....  75 

IX.     The  Blind  Alley  of  Science  ...  84 

X.     The  Insolvency  of  Organized  Religion  90 

XI.     The  Harvest  of  Bad  Husbandry  .        .  105 

XII.     The  Signs  of  the  Times  .         .        .         .114 

7 


8  CONTENTS 

PART  III 
THE   SPIRITUAL  POINT   OF   VIEW 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

XIII.  The  True  Superman       ....  127 

XIV.  From  Flesh  to  Spirit    ....  137 

XV.     The  Universe  of  Spirit  .         .         .151 

XVI.     The  Historical  Jesus  and  the  Eternal 

Christ          ......  163 

XVII.     Life  at  the  Cross           ....  194 

XVIII,     The  Fellowship  of  the  Cross       .         .210 

XIX.     The  New  Evangelism     ....  233 

XX.     The  Imperialism  of  the  Spirit      .         .  247 

XXI.     Social  Reconstruction  ....  259 

XXII.     The  Spiritual  Mind  at  Work      .         .  275 

XXIII.  The  Perfect  Law — the  Law  of  Liberty  288 

XXIV.  The  Spiritual  Life  at  Work        .         .  306 


PREFACE 

A  FEW  words  are  necessary  in  explanation  of  the 
purpose  and  method  of  the  following  pages. 
The  book  falls  into  three  divisions.  The 
first  is  a  brief  essay  in  diagnosis.  It  presupposes  that 
the  prevailing  atmosphere  "oT  tTie  time  will  embody 
itself  in  a  certain  temper  and  way  of  life,  and  it 
endeavors  to  discover  the  general  character  of  that 
atmosphere  by  an  analysis  of  Jjie  average  man. 

In  the  second  division,  the  diagnosis  is  carried 
farther  afield.  It  is  an  attempt  to  estimate  the  sig- 
nificance of  certain  movements  and  tendencies — intel- 
lectual, social,  religious — of  the  present  day;  and  it 
suggests  that  these  influences,  though  heterogeneous  in 
character,  justify  the  belief  that  they  will  ultimately 
converge  upon  a  single  issue :  namely,  the  resurgence 
of  a  new  order_of_life  through  the  renascence  of  faith. 

The  third  division  contains  an  attempt  to  appreciate 
the  consequences  which  are  likely  to  follow  from  such 
an  awakening  of  the  spiritual  life,  in  the  domains  of 
religion,  thought,  and  conduct. 

The  obligations  which  I  am  under  are  too  many 
to  be  recorded  here;  but  the  reader  will  probably 
discover  that  I  owe  more  to  the  stimulus  received 
from  Rudolf  Eucken  than  to  any  other  single  in- 
fluence. 


lo  PREFACE 

Though  pretending  to  no  gift  of  prediction,  I 
am  not  ashamed  to  confess  that  I  am  anticipating  a 
revival  of  the  spiritual  way  of  life  among  us — a 
renascence  which  may  make  a  new  man  of  the  average 
man  of  to-day,  which  will  deliver  the  Church  from  that 
mediocrity  of  experience  and  endeavor  by  which  Christ 
is  discredited  in  our  time,  and  which  will  deliver  na- 
tional life  from  the  undisguised  materialism  of  its  pol- 
icies and  adventures. 

The  best  I  can  hope  for  my  book  is  that  it  may 
make  some  little  contribution  to  the  hastening  of  the 
renascence. 

I  have  to  acknowledge  the  kindness  of  my  friend 
Mr.  John  Menzies  in  revising  the  proofs. 

RICHARD  ROBERTS. 

Crouch  Hill  Presbyterian  Church, 
London,  N. 
January,  igi2. 


PART  I 
THE  AVERAGE  MAN 


THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 


THE  MAN  HIMSELF 

THE  Average  Man,  otherwise  the  Man  in  the 
Street,  one  morning  awoke  to  find  himself  fa- 
mous. Overnight  a  certain  exalted  person  had 
(so  it  transpired)  discovered  him  and  constituted  him 
into  a  Supreme  Court  of  Appeal.  Hitherto  he  had 
hardly  been  aware  of  his  own  existence;  still  less  had 
he  suspected  that  others,  least  of  all  the  great  ones  of 
the  earth,  were  aware  of  him.  Then,  suddenly,  great- 
ness, even  sovereignty,  was  thrust  upon  him ;  and  since 
that  day  his  name  has  been  the  object  of  much  fervid 
invocation.  It  has  been  the  great  resource  of  pas- 
sionate politicians  at  a  loss  for  an  argument.  This  is 
the  day  of  the  apotheosis  of  the  Man  in  the  Street. 
He  seems,  at  long  last,  to  have  come  into  his  kingdom. 
The  event  was  indeed  long  overdue.  It  would  be 
rash  to  say  that  the  full  implications  of  the  arrival  of 
the  Man  in  the  Street  have  even  yet  occurred  to  those 
whom  it  concerns.  Meantime  it  is  worth  pointing  out 
that  this  very  ordinary  person,  so  lately  discovered,  has 
always  been  the  critical  factor  in  every  endeavor  after 
political  or  social  progress.  He  has  determined  the 
direction  and  velocity  of  all  movements  in  the  body 

13 


14  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

politic.  This  is  not  to  say  that  he  is  a  reformer — his 
best  friend  would  hardly  so  call  him.  Changes  are 
not  grateful  to  him.  Yet  there  can  be  neither  change 
nor  reform  without  him.  The  Roman  poet  could 
afford  to  say  ''  Odi  profanum  milgiis,"  "  I  hate  the 
Man  in  the  Street " ;  but  we  have  moved  on  a 
great  way  since  then.  Even  the  poet  has  nowa- 
days to  speak  respectfully  of  the  Man  in  the  Street, 
and  the  politician  falls  at  his  feet  and  brings  him 
offerings. 

The  philosopher  has  invariably  paid  the  penalty  of 
forgetting  him.  Abstract  speculations  which  do  not 
reckon  with  him  are  foredoomed,  after  a  brief  spasm 
of  controversy,  to  pass  into  the  populous  limbo  of 
"  exploded  ideas."  The  history  of  philosophy  is,  in 
great  part,  a  pathetic  scrap-heap.  Sometimes  indeed 
a  speculative  idea  from  some  remote  academy  may 
percolate  by  devious  ways  into  the  street,  but  it  usually 
arrives  there  after  its  own  mother  has  disowned  it.  It 
is  perhaps  possible  that  some  of  the  traditional  posi- 
tions of  philosophy  may  have  come  down  to  the  Aver- 
age Man  through  preacher  and  teacher,  and  may  even 
now  form  a  part  of  his  mental  stock-in-trade.  Yet  he 
himself  is  certainly  not  aware  of  it;  and  the  philoso- 
pher would  be  hard  put  to  it  to  discover  the  possible 
Platonic  or  Aristotelian  streak  in  the  intellectual  fur- 
niture of  the  ordinary  person.  Philosophy  cannot 
come  down  to  the  street.  It  never  has  come;  there  has 
been  no  such  thing  as  a  popular  philosophy.  The  Man 
in  the  Street  in  Athens  or  Alexandria  may  have  ab- 
sorbed a  thin  smattering  of  philosophy  from  his  sur- 
roundings; but  he  did  not  establish  a  tradition  of  vul- 
gar philosophy.     The  academic  philosopher  (there  is 


THE  MAN  HIMSELF  15 

no  other)  and  the  Man  in  the  Street  have  no  points  of 
contact.     This  is  so  much  the  worse  for  philosophy. 

Rehgion  has,  on  the  whole,  treated  the  Average 
Man  with  more  understanding.  The  test  of  a  true 
religion  is  whether  it  can  be  proclaimed  on  a  street- 
corner.  The  refined  abstractions  of  an  ethical  society 
may  edify  a  few  select  highly  organized  souls,  but  they 
stand  no  chance  of  acceptance  by  the  crowd.  The 
religion  with  a  future  is  one  that  can  come  down  into 
the  street.  The  secret  of  the  expansion  of  Christianity 
in  the  early  centuries  of  its  history  was  simply — as 
Deissmann  has  so  clearly  shown — that  it  came  down 
to  the  street  in  a  splendid  thoroughgoing  way.  Its 
appeal  was  hardly  heard  in  high  places,  but  it  was 
gladly  heard  in  mean  streets.  A  religion  stands  or 
falls  by  what  it  has  to  offer  to  the  common  man.  It 
looks  indeed  to-day  as  though  Christianity  has  lost 
its  ancient  genius  and  has  no  longer  anything  to  offer 
to  the  common  man  that  he  has  any  need  or  use  for. 
This  is  a  matter  which  requires  much  serious  looking 
into.  The  trouble  can  hardly  be  in  the  Man  in  the 
Street,  for  in  essence  he  has  hardly  changed  at  all  these 
two  thousand  years  and  more. 

It  is  the  tendency  nowadays  among  religious  folk 
to  chide  the  Man  in  the  Street  for  his  indifference. 
But  this  is  an  exceedingly  futile  thing  to  do.  It  is  as 
though  a  doctor  were  to  criticise  a  man  for  having 
spots  on  his  skin,  instead  of  getting  to  work  to  discover 
and  remove  the  cause  of  the  spots.  There  is,  more- 
over, a  considerable  fallacy  beneath  this  somewhat 
querulous  criticism  of  the  "  indifferent  masses,"  which 
is  not  sufficiently  recognized — namely,  the  assumption 
that  they  are  more  indifferent  to-day  than  they  nor- 


i6  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

mally  are.  Despite  emptying  churches,  it  is  very 
doubtful  whether  this  assumption  is  true.  There  are 
historical  instances  of  communities  being  caught  up 
by  a  quick,  flaming  sense  of  God  and  of  His  claims 
upon  them.  But  these  have  been  comparatively  few 
in  number  and  brief  in  duration.  Principal  George 
Adam  Smith  speaks,  in  his  exposition  of  Zephaniah  the 
Prophet,  of  the  "  obscure,  nameless  persons  who  op- 
pose their  almost  unconquerable  inertia  to  every  move- 
ment of  reform,  and  are  the  drag  upon  all  vital  and 
progressive  religion.  The  great  causes  of  God  and 
humanity  are  not  defeated  by  the  hot  assaults  of  the 
devil,  but  by  the  slow,  crushing,  glacier-like  weight  of 
thousands  and  thousands  of  indifferent  nobodies." 
That  seems  to  be  the  usual  state  of  affairs,  though  it 
hardly  meets  the  case  to  describe  the  Man  in  the  Street 
as  a  nobody.  There  may  have  been  periods  of 
autocracy  and  oligarchy  when  he  did  not  count  for 
much  in  the  determination  of  affairs;  but  in  modern 
times  he  commands  the  situation.  In  all  matters  of 
our  collective  life  the  last  word  is  with  him. 

It  is  worth  notice,  moreover,  that  beneath  all  his 
inertia  the  Average  Man  possesses  a  certain  inflamma- 
bility which  has,  on  occasions,  had  very  ugly  conse- 
quences. Sometimes  after  a  spell  of  anxiety  he  may 
be  caught  by  a  contagion  of  hysteria;  and  in  our  day 
this  characteristic  has  added  a  new  word  to  our  vo- 
cabulary. Mafficking  is  not  a  modern  thing;  the 
name  only  is  modern.  At  other  times  he  may  be 
seized  by  a  sense  of  having  suffered  an  accumulation 
of  injustice,  and  may  break  out  into  hot  revolt  until  a 
whole  country  is  swept  by  an  avalanche  of  passion,  as 
France  was  in  the  days  of  the  Revolution.     Perhaps 


THE  MAN  HIMSELF  17 

the  Man  in  the  Street  is  properly  described  as  a 
sleeping  volcano,  with  fires  deep  down  in  his  soul.  If 
only  the  fires  could  be  trained  to  give  a  steady  light, 
and  not  be  permitted  to  produce  out  of  sight  a  sur- 
charge of  heat  which  must  sooner  or  later  erupt  and 
send  forth  a  deluge  of  silly  hysteria  or  destructive 
wrath ! 

The  Man  in  the  Street  is,  in  sober  truth,  the  out- 
standing challenge  to  religion  and  modern  civilization. 
To  educate  him  into  an  intelligent  vivid  sense  of  per- 
sonal and  public  responsibility  were  to  transform  the 
face  of  the  earth.     The  Church  has  always  had  its  eye 
on  him,  and  here  and  there  manages  to  capture  him.  ; 
For  the  greater  part,  however,  he  remains  stolidly  out-  | 
side  the  circle  of  religious  and  other  cultural  influences.  '• 
He  does  not  belong  to  any  particular  class  in  society. 
He  is  indigenous  at  all  social  latitudes.     The  mistake 
that  many  people  are  making  is  to  imagine  that  the 
area  of  modern  indifference  is  delimited  by  certain  so- 
cial gradations.     We  speak  of  the  "alienation  of  the. 
working  class  from  the  Church  " ;  but  this  alienation  is  ( 
not  confined  to  the  working  classes — it  is  even  question-' 
able  whether  it  is  not  proportionately  more  general  and 
diffused  among  other  classes.     Nor  is  it  to  be  supposed 
that  indifference  to  the  Church  implies  indifference  to 
religion.     Of  indifference  to  religion  there  is  probably 
less  among  the  working  classes  than  among  the  well- 
to-do.     And  such  apathy  as  prevails  among  the  work- 
ing classes  is  not  specifically  and  exclusively  indiffer- 
ence to  religion.     There  are  those  who,   with  very 
little  acquaintance  with  the  facts,  are  readily  persuaded 
that  the  working  classes  have  discarded  religion  for 
socialism.     As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  statistics  relating 


i8  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

to  trade  unionism  (which  does  not  in  itself  entail  any 
necessary  adherence  to  socialistic  ideals)  show  a  very 
astonishing  tardiness  on  the  part  of  the  working  classes 
to  enter  trade  combinations,  and  this  despite  the  fact, 
obvious  to  the  most  casual  onlooker,  that  combination 
is  the  one  hope  of  such  effective  economic  and  social 
readjustments  as  may  be  required  in  order  to  secure 
some  adequate  measure  of  ease  and  sufficiency  of  life. 
The  problem  of  indifference  among  the  working  classes 
is  not  to  be  solved  by  brisk  and  facile  generalizations, 
nor  is  it  to  be  solved  apart  from  the  larger  ques- 
tion which  is  raised  by  the  presence  of  the  same 
problem  in  other  quarters. 

Neither  does  the  Man  in  the  Street  belong  essentially 
to  any  particular  time  or  place.  He  is,  in  a  sense,  a 
perennial  and  universal  type.  He  has  changed  the  cut 
of  his  clothes,  but  he  has  not  changed  the  cut  of  his 
soul.  The  hue  of  his  complexion  has  varied  in  differ- 
ent places,  but  not  the  hue  of  his  spirit.  The  variations 
from  the  type  are  determined  by  local  and  temporary 
circumstances.  He  has  the  chameleon's  capacity  for 
taking  on  the  color  of  his  surroundings — an  absorbent 
quality  which  makes  him  the  characteristic  embodi- 
ment of  the  temper  of  his  own  time.  We  know  him 
pretty  well  in  his  present  phase.  A  description  of  him 
may  not  indeed  actually  fit  any  known  person  in  detail, 
for  there  are  minor  variations  which  spring  from  a 
thousand  and  one  hidden  causes;  but  there  can  be  no 
mistake  about  the  type.  Picture  him,  therefore,  as  a 
decent,  respectable  person,  who  goes  to  his  work  in  the 
morning,  and  is  glad  to  get  home  again  in  the  evening 
— unless,  indeed,  he  be  of  the  highly  gregarious  kind 
which  gravitates  to  the  club.    He  has  a  few  interests — 


THE  MAN  HIMSELF  19 

perhaps  a  family  of  children,  the  best  of  all  interests; 
or  a  bit  of  garden ;  or  possibly  a  dog  that  must  be  taken 
out  for  a  walk  on  Sunday  mornings.  He  follows  the 
cricket  and  football  news,  and  plumes  himself  upon 
being  something  of  a  sportsman,  sometimes  even  put- 
ting a  little  money  on  a  horse  he  has  never  seen.  An 
assiduous  reader  of  the  newspapers,  he  derives  from 
his  morning  sheet  his  opinions  upon  most  subjects. 
He  raises  a  mild  interest  in  politics  at  election  times, 
but  is  not  much  troubled  by  them  in  the  interval. 
The  big  movements  in  Church  and  State  do  not  break 
his  sleep.  He  thinks  that  the  Bible  should  be  taught 
in  the  schools,  and  he  cannot  quite  make  out  what 
the  parsons  are  quarrelling  about;  but  it  does  not 
occur  to  him  that  he  might  teach  the  Bible  to  his 
children  at  home.  He  goes  to  church  sometimes,  en- 
dures the  service  in  a  half-bored  way,  and  then  thinks, 
like  a  good  Englishman,  he  has  done  his  duty.  He 
has  his  own  little  set  of  conventions  and  habits,  which 
he  hates  to  have  disturbed.  He  is  the  typical  product 
of  our  modern  Western  civilization,  an  epitome  of  all 
the  problems  of  our  own  time. 

The  Man  in  the  Street  is  the  modern  problem — for 
the  preacher,  the  politician,  and  the  social  reformer. 
The  waste  of  good  human  material  at  both  ends  of 
the  social  scale  is  only  possible  because  the  Man  in 
the  Street  cannot  be  persuaded  to  mend  his  ways. 
The  social  reformer  cries  aloud  for  a  more  equitable 
distribution  of  wealth;  and  in  the  end  it  is  not  Dives, 
but  the  Man  in  the  Street,  who  hinders  it.  A  great 
deal  of  energy  and  endeavor  has  been  spent  in  re- 
claiming the  human  debris  which  is  strewn  so  prod- 
igally about  all  great  populous  centres;  much  of  it  had 


20  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

been  better  spent  in  inducing  the  Man  in  the  Street  to 
see  the  folly  of  maintaining  a  scheme  of  things  which 
will  go  on  producing  human  debris  so  long  as  it  is 
permitted  to  exist.  It  is  far  too  readily  assumed  that 
the  social  problem  begins  and  ends  with  the  "  sub- 
merged tenth."  The  squalor  and  misery  of  the  slum 
are  not  the  disease,  but  the  symptoms  of  it.  The  dis- 
ease ramifies  through  the  whole  structure  of  society; 
and  the  point  at  which  the  remedy  is  to  be  applied  is 
the  Man  in  the  Street.  His  vote  determines  elections; 
his  voice  is  public  opinion.  To  quicken  his  conscience, 
to  compel  him  to  think,  to  awaken  him  to  a  sense  of  so- 
cial responsibility,  to  give  him  faith — this  is  the  central 
problem  of  our  age.  And  this  is  not  merely  the  swift- 
est and  directest,  but  the  only  road  to  the  City  of  God. 


II 

THE  ECLIPSE  OF  GOD 

THERE  are  no  Atheists  to-day.  Atheism  has 
been  extinct  for  many  a  day.  It  belongs  to 
the  crude  and  elementary  stages  of  unbelief. 
The  Atheist,  if  perchance  here  and  there  he  survives, 
is  a  quaint  antiquity. 

The  habit  of  modern  unbelief  is  agnosticism.  The 
Agnostic  neither  denies  nor  affirms  (though  he  has  at 
times  involved  himself  in  the  paradox  of  affirming 
the  unknowability  of  God,  which  unsatisfying  affir- 
mation seems,  on  his  own  premises,  to  be  beyond  his 
competence  to  make).  He  says,  "I  do  not  know," 
and  leaves  it  at  that.  It  is  perhaps  not  sufficiently 
recognized  that  the  Christian  believer  sets  out  by 
implying,  if  not  by  saying,  the  same  thing.  But  he 
does  not  leave  it  at  that.  He  goes  on  to  say :  "  Where 
I  do  not  know,  I  believe;  I  have  the  right  to  believe, 
and  the  right  to  assume  that  by  believing  I  shall  come 
upon  certain  knowledge  which  is  otherwise  inaccessi- 
ble." One  must  be  an  Agnostic  in  order  to  be  a  be- 
liever. Atheism  is  the  negation  of  faith;  agnosticism 
is  the  admission  of  ignorance  and  the  preliminary  of 
faith.  The  gulf  between  the  Atheist  and  the  Agnostic 
is  far  wider  and  more  impassable  than  the  gulf  be- 
tween the  Agnostic  and  the  Christian  believer. 

It  is  moreover  clear  that  the  modern  Agnostic  is 
in  some  senses  very  distinctly  a  man  of  faith.     That 


22  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

is  what  we  should  expect.  The  human  spirit  cannot 
Hve  on  negations,  and  there  is  in  all  true  agnosticism 
an  intuitive  and  inherent  demand  for  a  positive  con- 
struction of  the  universe.  It  cannot  remain  static. 
It  has  been  characteristic  of  all  the  great  Agnostics 
that  they  have  cherished  a  splendid  faith  in  the  cer- 
tainty of  human  progress,  in  the  noble  inalienable  des- 
tiny of  man.  And  faith  this  undeniably  is,  for  human 
progress  and  human  destiny  are  as  little  demonstrable 
as  the  existence  of  God.  It  was  practical  faith,  rather 
than  the  agnosticism  they  professed,  that  gave  driving 
force  to  the  work  by  which  we  remember  Huxley  and 
Tyndall  and  Spencer;  and  the  content  of  this  faith  is 
simply  an  irresistible  and  indestructible  sense  of  the  es- 
sential friendliness  of  the  ultimate  moral  and  spiritual 
forces  of  the  universe;  which  is  only  a  thin  and  diffuse 
way  of  speaking  of  God.  This  kind  of  Agnostic  is  a 
believer,  and  a  believer  in  God,  without  knowing  it. 
His  faith  may  not  be  cast  into  concrete  or  definite 
forms ;  all  the  same  it  is  faith.  For  in  the  last  analysis 
a  man's  faith  does  not  consist  in  his  opinions,  but  in 
his  attitude  to  and  outlook  upon  the  world,  and  in 
the  way  he  handles  it.  A  man,  though  he  subscribe 
to  no  creed,  who  looks  upon  the  world  and  the  future 
with  a  cheerful  and  hopeful  eye,  with  so  much  good 
cheer  and  hope  that  he  thinks  it  worth  while  to  do 
real  work  upon  the  world,  is  a  believer  in  spite  of  him- 
self. He  may  deny  it,  but  that  makes  no  difference. 
He  may  not  assent  to  every  proposition  or  to  a  single 
proposition  of  religion;  nevertheless  in  his  heart 
(which  is  the  organ  that  in  the  end  really  matters) 
he  remains  a  true  believer. 

Agnosticism  bore  within  it  the  seeds  of  dissolution 


THE  ECLIPSE  OF  GOD  23 

from  the  beginning;  and  its  day  is  done.  Neveithe- 
less  it  must  be  conceded  that  it  has  been  of  enormous 
value  in  fixing  and  accentuating  the  Hmits  of  faith, 
and  in  safeguarding  the  liberty  of  faith  from  degener- 
ating into  license.  It  may  well  be  that  the  historian  of 
thought  in  times  to  come  will  regard  it  as  a  necessary 
phase  in  the  reconstruction  and  rehabilitation  of  re- 
ligious truth.  At  the  same  time  it  should  not  be  for- 
gotten that  agnosticism,  so  far  as  it  was  a  defined  and 
articulate  cult,  was  the  monopoly  of  a  comparatively 
small,  highly  educated  class.  It  involves  a  standpoint 
which  the  Man  in  the  Street  is  incompetent  to  ap- 
preciate. He  does  not  wait  to  make  nice  distinctions 
between  fashions  of  thought;  and  in  particular  a 
philosophy  which  has  nothing  to  say  to  the  future 
has  little  in  it  to  commend  itself  to  him.  William 
James  says  that  no  philosophy  has  a  chance  of  life 
which  does  not  "  define  the  future  congruously  with 
our  spontaneous  powers."  Agnosticism  from  the  na- 
ture of  the  case  must  remain  dumb  about  the  future; 
and  the  ordinary  person  is  on  the  whole  more  inter- 
ested in  the  future  than  he  is  in  anything  else.  It  is 
upon  this  that  crystal-gazers  and  soothsayers  thrive 
and  batten ;  and  he  must  be  a  very  unusual  person  in- 
deed, however  stem  the  intellectual  discipline  he  has 
undergone,  who  does  not  in  his  heart  sometimes  be- 
lieve that  "  there's  a  good  time  coming." 

It  would,  however,  be  idle  to  suppose  that  the 
agnostic  temper  has  not  reacted  very  considerably  on 
very  many  people.  The  authority  with  which  its  first 
protagonists  spoke  by  reason  of  their  great  scientific 
distinction,  produced  a  widespread  unsettlement  of 
faith  among  a  class  of  people  who  were  impressed  by 


24  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

the  eminence  of  the  new  prophets,  but  were  ill  equipped 
for  a  serious  examination  of  their  teaching.  In  con- 
sequence there  has  been  a  vague,  somewhat  elusive 
kind  of  doubt  current  which  could  not  give  any  very 
intelligent  account  of  itself.  This,  however,  is  not  to 
say  that  there  has  not  been  or  is  not  a  very  appreciable 
amount  of  genuine  intellectual  uncertainty  prevalent; 
but,  there  is  certainly  nothing  like  as  much  as  is  gener- 
ally supposed.  But  whether  it  be  much  or  little,  this 
kind  of  doubt  is  a  thing  to  be  devoutly  thankful  for. 
True  doubt  is  only  the  spirit  of  faith  bereft  of  the 
forms  of  faith  and  still  seeking  them ;  and  it  is  resolved 
in  the  end,  not  by  subtlety  of  argument  or  momentum 
of  logic,  but  by  the  stern  necessities  of  the  endeavor 
after  the  moral  life.  It  is  not  beside  the  point  to 
remark  that  a  good  deal  of  what  passes  as  honest 
doubt  is  deliberately  dishonest  unbelief  which  is  in- 
tended to  cover  a  vicious  life  or  to  choke  off  a  trouble- 
some conscience.  For  the  rest,  the  vague,  indeter- 
minate feeling  of  the  precariousness  of  faith,  which  is 
the  actual  result  of  agnosticism  upon  the  ordinary 
fairly  educated  mind,  has  relaxed  the  hold  of  inbred 
piety  upon  many  people  and  has  led  to  incalculable 
impoverishment  of  life.  Its  effect  has  been  wholly 
negative;  and  it  has  failed  to  provide  a  substitute 
for  what  it  denies  in  the  shape  of  another  positive 
stimulus  to  right  action  and  strenuous  living.  There  is 
no  more  pathetic  or  hopeless  soul  in  the  world  than 
that  which  is  persuaded  that  the  bottom  has  dropped 
out  of  its  faith,  without  knowing  how  it  happened, 
which  is  astray  in  a  mist  of  uncertainty,  and  is  unable 
to  find  any  secure  stance  for  the  recovery  of  faith. 
The  soul  sick  with  doubt  and  sick  of  doubt,  yet  in- 


THE  ECLIPSE  OF  GOD  25 

capable  of  diagnosing  its  trouble,  is  in  some  respects 
the  most  trying  problem  of  pastoral  duty. 

Faith  has  moreover  been  hard  hit  in  our  own 
generation  by  vague,  indeterminate,  abstract  ways 
of  speaking  of  God.  Matthew  Arnold's  "  stream  of 
tendency  not  ourselves  which  makes  for  righteous- 
ness "  is  not  easily  apprehended  by  ordinary  folk; 
still  less  easily  worshipped.  "  The  First  Cause," 
"  The  Life  Force,"  are  poor,  attenuated  substitutes  for 
the  God  to  Whom  our  grandfathers  prayed.  For  all 
practical  purposes  of  real  life,  these  abstractions  are 
entirely  useless.  They  may  suit  some  highly  spec- 
ulative types  of  mind  that  can  feed  upon  abstractions, 
but  they  leave  the  ordinary  person  hanging  in  mid- 
air. As  Martineau  pointed  out  long  ago,  you  cannot 
pray  to  the  First  Cause;  or  say,  "  O  Stream  of  tend- 
ency that  makes  for  righteousness,  be  merciful  unto 
me  a  sinner."  There  can  be  no  reality  or  attractive- 
ness in  any  religion,  so  far  as  the  Average  Man  is  con- 
cerned, which  does  not,  in  theory  at  least,  profess  to  be 
a  communion  between  a  personal  God  and  the  human 
individual.  But  perhaps  the  severest  criticism  which 
can  be  directed  against  this  tendency  is  that  it  denudes 
the  Deity  of  moral  character.  For  we  cannot  conceive 
of  morality  which  is  not  associated  with  personality. 
It  may  be  that  all  this  is  at  last  to  be  traced  to  the 
circumstance  that  physical  science  has  led  us  to  think 
of  God  largely,  if  not  altogether,  in  terms  of  energy: 
and  that  therefore  we  are  surer  of  God's  power  than 
of  His  holiness,  the  inevitable  result  being  a  relaxation 
and  an  enfeeblement  of  moral  sanctions.  This  is 
sometimes  called  a  revolt  from  Puritanism.  It  would 
be  more  correct  to  call  it  an  apostasy. 


26  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

Side  by  side  with  this  vagueness  in  our  thought  of 
God  is  the  growing  emphasis  upon  the  Immanence  of 
God.  Whether  the  conception  of  Immanence  has 
contributed  to  the  vagueness,  or  the  vagueness  has 
adopted  the  conception  of  Immanence  as  a  doctrinal 
refuge  for  a  reHgious  instinct  which  would  otherwise 
be  homeless,  there  can  be  little  doubt  that  there  is 
some  connection  between  the  two.  The  doctrine  of 
the  Divine  Immanence  is  a  great,  necessary,  true 
doctrine,  also  a  very  ancient  one.  It  received  its 
earliest  thoroughgoing  expression  in  the  Stoics,  and 
we  have  hardly  improved  upon  the  form  of  it  since 
their  day.  The  place  it  should  hold  in  personal  ex- 
perience it  will  be  necessary  to  discuss  at  a  later  stage; 
meantime  we  may  note  that  no  little  confusion  has 
arisen  in  many  minds  by  reason  of  the  apparently 
irreconcilable  antithesis  between  the  two  ideas  of 
Transcendence  and  Immanence;  and  in  consequence 
there  is  a  good  deal  of  the  ill-digested  pantheism 
abroad  which  exercises  no  moral  discipline,  and  dis- 
solves all  the  iron  out  of  faith. 

These  tendencies  have  all  made  their  contribution 
to  the  prevailing  temper  of  our  time;  though  it  may 
be  questioned  how  far  they  have  directly  affected 
the  Man  in  the  Street.  His  life  lies  for  the  greater 
part  outside  the  circle  in  which  these  intellectual  move- 
ments are  live  issues;  and  what  reaction  they  have 

\  had  upon  him  is  on  the  whole  indirect.  What  they 
have  really  done  is  to  confirm  him  in  a  habit  of  prac- 
tical atheism,  which  constitutes  that  eclipse  of  God 
which  is  the  greatest  menace  and  peril  of  the  time 
we  live  in. 

'     By  practical  atheism  I  mean  that  habit  of  mind 


THE  ECLIPSE  OF  GOD  27 

and  way  of  life  in  which  God  counts  for  nothing.  It 
does  not  go  out  of  its  way  to  deny  God  vocally;  it 
simply  goes  on  its  way  as  though  there  were  no  God 
— says  it,  like  the  fool  of  the  Scriptures,  "  in  his 
heart."  That  God  exists  is  a  pious  opinion  which  lies 
on  the  surface  of  his  brain  and  makes  no  difference  to 
the  man.  He  may  go  as  far  as  to  say  his  prayers ;  but 
more  because  it  is  an  old  habit  which,  omitted,  would 
leave  him  with  an  uncomfortable  feeling  of  something 
left  undone,  than  because  it  has  vital  meaning  to  him. 
It  is  merely  a  part  of  the  day's  routine.  Otherwise 
the  thought  of  God  exerts  no  particular  influence  upon 
the  management  of  his  life.  It  leaves  him  where  it 
found  him.  It  is  not  that  he  deliberately  separates 
God  from  the  ordinary  concerns  of  life  as  those  do 
who  say  that  *'  religion  has  nothing  to  do  with  busi- 
ness," but  that  he  simply  leaves  God  out  without  rea- 
son or  argument.  The  belief,  deliberately  and  con- 
sciously held,  in  the  existence  of  a  moral  God  is  bound 
to  tell  upon  one's  way  of  life.  The  devils  believe  it, 
says  St.  James,  "  and  tremble."  It  does  make  a  dif- 
ference to  them;  but  the  Man  in  the  Street  does  not 
tremble,  still  less  rejoice.  The  thought  of  God  brings 
him  neither  fear  nor  gladness  nor  any  other  emotion ; 
for  it  never  occurs  to  him. 

This  temper  leads  to  many  things.  It  certainly 
is  the  most  fertile  of  all  causes  of  that  "  indifference  " 
to  which  reference  has  already  been  made.  A  quick, 
vital  sense  of  God  compels  a  man  to  take  sides.  It 
cannot  leave  him  unmoved.  When  once  it  is  fixed 
in  one's  mind  that  behind  the  sum  of  things  there  is 
a  moral  power  living  and  moving  and  working,  one 
is  bound  sooner  or  later  to  range  oneself  with  it  or 


28  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

against  it.  There  can  be  no  standing  still.  One  may 
choose  to  fight  with  it  or  withstand  it.  In  either  case 
there  is  an  end  of  all  practical  atheism.  One's  recog- 
nition of  IT  makes  one  a  theist,  whether  friendly  or 
otherwise.  The  practical  Atheist  is  the  man  who  is 
neither  for  God  nor  against  Him;  who  is,  like  those 
miserable  souls  in  the  outer  rim  of  the  Inferno,  for 
himself  alone.  For  this  kind  of  indifference  is  at  bot- 
tom only  selfishness;  and  selfishness  is  the  worst  and 
last  of  atheisms.  The  man  who  stands  aloof  from  the 
great  movements  of  God  and  humanity,  who  spends 
his  life  within  the  narrow  circle  of  his  own  private  in- 
terests, who  cuts  himself  away  from  the  throbbing  life 
of  his  nation  and  his  race,  with  its  mighty  hopes  and 
burning  desires,  denies  God  far  more  effectually  than 
the  man  who  says  with  his  lips,  "There  is  no  God."  For 
this  is  a  denial  of  God  and  a  denial  of  man  at  the  same 
time ;  for  '*  man  has  no  end  which  is  not  also  God's." 
All  the  great  flaming  enthusiasms  of  history  have  been 
born  of  God.  "  The  name  of  God  must  be  inscribed 
upon  our  banner,"  cried  Mazzini,  fighting  for  a  free 
united  Italy.  "  And  the  best  of  all  is,"  said  John 
Wesley  in  his  great  enterprise  of  evangelism,  "  God 
is  with  us."  The  great  causes  of  God  and  man  move 
tardily  to-day  because  the  face  of  God  has  passed  into 
eclipse. 

Together  with  this  blight  of  indifference,  there  is 
a  grave  decline  in  the  authority  and  the  activity  of 
the  moral  sense.  There  are  a  few  strong  souls  who 
can  keep  their  moral  natures  tautly  braced  up  by  sheer 
energy  of  will;  but  for  common  folk  it  is  only  the 
reinforcement  which  the  thought  of  God  constantly 
impinging  upon  their  consciousness  brings,  that  can 


THE  ECLIPSE  OF  GOD  29 

keep  the  distinction  between  right  and  wrong  clear 
and  imperative.  The  Man  in  the  Street  certainly 
recognizes  in  a  general  way  that  things  are  right  or 
wrong;  but  the  Tightness  of  the  right  and  the  wrong- 
ness  of  the  wrong  do  not  greatly  move  him,  and  are 
not  controlling  and  sovereign  principles  of  action. 
When  it  is  not  conventional,  what  morality  he  has 
is  frankly  prudential.  If  he  is  honest,  it  is  mainly 
because  it  is  the  best  policy.  He  has  superseded  the 
Decalogue  with  one  comprehensive  commandment: 
*'  Thou  shalt  not  be  found  out."  His  conscience  is 
afflicted  with  two  disorders — an  incorrigible  sluggish- 
ness and  an  uncertain  attachment  to  his  will. 

It  is  to  this  moral  sluggishness  that  we  are  to  trace 
the  tardy  and  meagre  recognition  of  the  ethical  inward- 
ness of  great  political  and  economic  issues.  Politics 
and  Economics  are,  at  bottom,  departments  of  the 
science  of  moral  relations.  The  questions  they  raise 
are  ultimately  moral  questions.  Yet  the  moral  question 
is  the  very  last  we  ask  concerning  our  political  and 
economic  enterprises.  In  that  region,  right  and  wrong 
are  synonymous  with  Liberal  and  Conservative,  In- 
dividualism and  Socialism,  or  contrariwise ;  and  there 
is  nothing  more  to  be  said.  It  is  only  to  a  few  that 
it  occurs  to  ask  the  fundamental  and  more  material 
questions  which  at  last  decide  the  fate  of  all  our 
political  and  social  adventures.  It  is,  however,  in  the 
single  life  that  we  may  trace  the  consequences  of  this 
relaxation  of  moral  sanctions  with  most  certainty.  A 
man  may  go  a  long  way  quite  respectably  even  upon 
this  level  of  moral  mediocrity  so  long  as  his  social 
moorings  hold.  His  love  for  his  mother  or  wife  or 
children,  or  some  other  deep  sentiment,  will  save  him. 


30  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

But  let  him  lose  that,  and  all  his  safeguards  come 
tumbling  down,  with  such  results  as  we  frequently 
see.  Anyone  who  has  seen  the  tragedy  of  unemploy- 
ment at  close  quarters  has  seen  this  kind  of  catas- 
trophe over  and  over  again.  When  lack  of  work  de- 
taches a  man  from  his  usual  social  anchorage  and  he 
has  no  other  safeguard  to  hold  him  up,  the  end  is 
almost  always  the  same.  There  are  hundreds  and 
thousands  of  men  in  this  country  to-day,  who  started 
with  all  the  possibilities  of  a  fine  humanity,  who  have 
declined  into  loafers  and  vagabonds  because,  having 
no  abiding  and  sure  anchorage,  the  pressure  of  ad- 
versity and  the  stringency  of  economic  conditions  have 
crushed  them  into  the  gutter. 

Is  it  to  be  wondered  at,  then,  that  recent  years 
have  seen  a  steady  increase  in  the  statistics  of  crime? 
Saving  only  for  a  slight  check  in  1906,  the  number 
of  indictable  offences  in  England  rose  from  50,494 
in  1899  to  68,1 16  in  1908.  This  represents  an  increase 
of  nearly  30  per  cent.,  whereas  the  increase  of  the 
population  during  the  same  period  was  probably  no 
more  than  10  per  cent.  However  we  may  account 
for  the  immediate  causes  of  this  advance  of  lawless- 
ness, its  ultimate  source  is  to  be  found  in  the  decline  of 
inner  moral  authority,  in  the  stifling  of  the  moral 
sense.  And  this  is  only  possible  because  God  has 
passed  out  of  our  common  life. 

"  Be  not  over-anxious,"  said  Jesus.  "...  Your 
heavenly  Father  knoweth."  He  was  speaking  to  a 
people  held  by  a  depression  almost  chronic  by  reason 
of  many  things;  and  His  antidote  to  worry  and  de- 
pression was  a  quick  remembrance  of  God.  Where 
there  is  a  vital  sense  of  God,  morbid  conditions  of 


THE  ECLIPSE  OF  GOD  31 

mind,  together  with  the  graver  and  more  organic 
mental  disorders  of  which  they  are  the  source,  tend 
to  disappear.  A  man  is  detached  from  undue  concern 
for  his  own  Httle  affairs,  and  is  able  to  throw  himself 
upon  the  unfailing  resources  of  the  Infinite  Love.  This 
was  Isaiah's  message  to  the  depressed  and  desperate 
exiles  of  Babylon :  "  Lift  up  your  eyes  on  high,  and 
behold  Who  hath  created  these  things."  But,  having 
lost  this  stimulus  to  faith,  we  are  a  generation  of  de- 
pressed and  harassed  souls,  and  we  are  producing  dis- 
ordered minds  at  a  calamitous  rate.  The  average  an- 
nual increase  of  insanity  for  the  ten  years  ending  De- 
cember 31st,  1908,  was  2,370  cases;  the  increase  in 
1910  was  2,703.  In  the  space  of  fifty  years  the  num- 
ber of  insane  persons  known  to  the  authorities  has 
grown  by  250  per  cent.,  while  the  estimated  increase 
of  the  general  population  has  been  about  82  per  cent. 
Allowance  must  be  made  for  a  certain  amount  of  con- 
genital insanity,  and  for  insanity  due  to  purely  phys- 
ical causes.  But  disordered  minds  have  their  origin 
usually — directly  or  indirectly — in  morbid,  self- 
centred  preoccupation;  and  the  only  sure  antidote  to 
this  condition  is  the  quickening  of  faith.  The  same 
disquieting  factor  is  to  be  discovered  in  the  similar 
increase  in  the  number  of  suicides  during  the  same 
period.  Worry,  depression  and  despair  arise,  in  the 
last  analysis,  from  the  obscuration  of  God,  and  the 
increase  of  insanity  and  suicide  bears  an  intimate  re- 
lation to  the  prevailing  godlessness. 

There  are  certain  moralists  who  ascribe  the  bulk 
of  crime  and  insanity  to  alcoholism,  and  think  that 
there  is  no  more  to  be  said  upon  the  matter.  Certainly 
drunkenness    has   much   to   do   with   the   great   and 


32  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

tragical  prevalence  of  social  and  mental  disorder. 
But  it  is  a  very  shallow  view  of  the  position  which 
enables  a  man  to  believe  that  if  we  could  only  get 
rid  of  drink  we  should  be  rid  of  our  troubles.  H  the 
diminution  of  drunkenness  is  the  thing  to  be  aimed  at, 
then  we  should  hail  periods  when  work  is  scarce,  for 
men  drink  less  at  those  times.  But  if  they  drink 
less,  they  are  more  criminal;  for  periods  of  acute  un- 
employment are  marked  by  an  increase  in  the  number 
of  indictable  offences.  It  is  moreover  germane  to  our 
point  that,  while  for  the  fifty  years  1857-1907  the 
proportion  of  indictable  offences  has  decreased  from 
2.84  to  1.76,  convictions  for  drunkenness  have  in- 
creased from  3.94  to  6.01.  In  1875,  which  gives  215, 
the  highest  index  number  in  the  measurement  of  con- 
victions for  drunkenness,  the  index  number  for  in- 
dictable offences  was  74;  whereas  in  the  year  1865, 
which  gives  us  the  maximum  index  figure  for  indict- 
able offences,  namely  100,  the  index  'number  for 
drunkenness  was  only  126.  On  the  other  hand,  in 
more  recent  years  1906  shows  the  highest  index  num- 
ber in  both  classes  of  offences — 64  for  indictable  of- 
fences, 163  for  drunkenness.  Looking  at  the  figures 
as  a  whole,  however,  the  inference  is  irresistible  that, 
while  our  record  has  greatly  improved  in  the  matter  of 
indictable  offences  in  the  fifty  years,  the  record  for 
drunkenness  has  become  worse.  These  facts  are  ad- 
duced simply  to  show  that  the  connection  between 
drink  and  crime  is  by  no  means  so  simple  as  it  appears 
to  be  on  temperance  platforms.  Drunkenness  is  an 
enormous  factor  in  our  problem;  it  would  be  criminal 
to  minimize  its  importance.  It  is  necessary,  however, 
that  we  should  put  it  in  its  true  relation  to  the  whole 


THE  ECLIPSE  OF  GOD  33 

position.  It  is  not  the  disease,  it  is  at  once  a  symp- 
tom and  an  acute  complication  of  it.  But  if  we  were 
to  get  rid  of  it,  the  disease  would  still  remain,  no  doubt 
cleared  of  many  of  its  most  loathsome  concomitants, 
but  still  devastating  and  disastrous  to  the  last  degree. 
That  disease  is  the  decay  of  faith. 


Ill 

THE  ECLIPSE  OF  THE  OTHER  MAN 

IT  was  asserted  in  the  preceding  chapter  that  "  self- 
ishness is  the  last  and  worst  of  atheisms."  The  as- 
sertion and  worship  of  oneself  is  a  pragmatic  de- 
nial of  God.  But  this,  like  other  general  statements, 
needs  qualification;  for  it  is  true  that  the  real  end  of 
man  is  to  be  and  to  assert  and  to  express  himself  as 
fully  and  as  completely  as  possible.  It  is  true  also  that 
to  discover  and  to  believe  in  God  is  in  the  end  the  only 
way  to  discover  and  believe  in  oneself.  And  that  not 
in  the  vague  and  perilous  way  of  believing  in  the  God 
within,  for  that  may  only  be  a  new  justification  for  a 
good  conceit  of  oneself.  Unless  the  doctrine  of  the 
Divine  Immanence  is  held  in  a  very  clear-sighted  way 
it  may  lead  into  very  dangerous  places.  It  may  be 
very  dignified  and  splendid,  as  the  old  Stoics  felt  it  to 
be,  to  feel  that  we  can  carry  God  about  with  us  in  our 
souls;  and  it  is  true  that  we  do  so;  but  unless  we 
recognize  clearly  within  what  limits  it  is  true  we  simply 
end  in  a  confusion  in  which  we  lose  both  God  and 
ourselves.  Until  I  recognize  that  God  is  also  with- 
out me  and  above  me,  I  cannot  have  any  adequate 
sense  of  the  individual  distinctiveness  of  my  own  per- 
sonal existence.  As  I  move  about  the  world  I  know 
that  I  am  not  another.  I  am  myself  among  others 
like   me.     But   the   God-within   doctrine   unbalanced 

34 


THE  ECLIPSE  OF  THE  OTHER  MAN     35 

by  the  God-without  doctrine  robs  me  in  the  end  of 
that  assurance.  The  outHnes  of  my  personaHty  are 
swamped  and  lost  in  an  endless  ocean  of  flat  being. 
I  am  as  much  the  other  man  as  I  am  myself.  Now, 
this  is  a  thing  that  my  nature  resolutely  refuses  to 
believe,  and  that  is  why  pantheism  has  gone  on  the 
philosophic  scrap-heap.  My  deepest  craving  is  to  be 
and  to  feel  that  I  am  Myself,  to  be  able  to  say  em- 
phatically, without  misgiving,  I.  I  long  for  self- 
realization;  I  spend  my  "fire  and  restless  force"  in 
seeking  it.  But  I  can  get  no  glimmering  of  it  until 
I  see  myself  stand  out  in  relief  over  against  the  God- 
above-me  Who  is  as  personal  and  distinct  from  me 
as  I  am  personal  and  distinct  from  Him.  The  Stoic, 
who  was  always  talking  about  the  "  God-within,"  never 
wholly  discovered  man.  He  only  discovered  states 
and  commonwealths.  The  older  Jew,  who  had  no 
notion  of  the  "  God-within  "  at  all,  did  discover  man. 
The  Psalmist  could  say,  "  Against  Thee,  Thee  only, 
have  I  sinned."  And  no  man  ever  discovers  himself 
so  acutely  and  convincingly  as  when  he  is  constrained 
to  conjugate  the  verb  "  to  sin  "  in  the  first  person 
past. 

The  other  end  of  the  truth,  however,  should  not 
be  overlooked.  Precisely  in  so  far  as  he  did  not  know 
the  God-within,  the  Jew  failed  to  discover  the  whole 
man.  The  Greek  also  had  his  share  of  the  truth. 
The  Jew,  because  he  only  saw  God  above,  saw  man 
below;  the  Greek,  because  he  saw  God  down,  saw 
man  up.  The  Jewish  sense  of  the  God-without  made 
man  a  worm.  The  Greek  sense  of  the  God-within 
made  man  a  king.  It  was  Christianity  that  solved 
the  problem  of  how  a  man  could  feel  a  worm  and  a 


36  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

king  at  the  same  time — which  is  just  what  a  man 
should  feel. 

For,  according  to  Christianity,  it  is  the  very  thing 
which  makes  me  feel  a  worm  that  makes  me  also  feel 
a  king,  to  wit,  my  relation  to  God,  It  is  my  con- 
sciousness of  God  which  gives  me  at  once  a  sense  of 
weakness  and  a  sense  of  power,  the  sense  of  my  utter 
shame  and  the  sense  of  my  splendid  inalienable  maj- 
esty. For  the  singularity  of  the  Christian  view  of 
man's  relation  to  God  lies  in  its  double  character.  It 
brings  God  to  our  side,  what  time  it  leaves  Him  in  the 
highest  heaven.  If  I  were  a  Jew,  my  apartness  from 
God  would  isolate  and  crush  me.  If  I  were  a  Greek, 
my  oneness  with  God  would  inflate  me.  But  since  I 
am  neither  Jew  nor  Greek,  and  yet  both,  being  a  Chris- 
tian, neither  of  these  things  happens.  My  combined 
sense  of  my  apartness  from  and  my  oneness  with  God 
keeps  me  where  I  ought  to  be,  humbled  by  the  thought 
of  what  I  am  in  myself,  exalted  by  the  thought  of 
what  I  am  to  God. 

Now,  the  average  man  is  not  acquainted  with  this 
experience  of  humiliation.  He  does  not  feel  himself 
a  worm,  because  he  takes  no  thought  of  the  God  above 
him;  and  if  he  plumes  himself  on  his  majesty,  it  is 
not  because  he  takes  any  thought  of  the  God- within, 
for  then  he  would  infallibly  discover  that  his  next- 
door  neighbor  is  also  and  equally  a  king.  His  trouble 
is  that  he  forgets  "  God-within-the-other-man."  The 
first  practical  implication  of  the  God-within  doctrine 
is  that  the  other  man  is  as  good  as  I  am;  the  inevitable 
corollary  of  the  God-without  doctrine  is  that  I  am 
not  quite  so  good  as  the  other  man,  because  I  am  really 
the  worst  man  that  ever  lived.    Paul,  the  best  of  men. 


THE  ECLIPSE  OF  THE  OTHER  MAN     37 

looking  straight  at  God,  describes  himself  as  "  the 
chief  of  sinners."  This  means  that  we  are  neither  to 
look  down  or  at  the  other  man,  but  up  to  him.  Rev- 
erence to  God  means  reverence  to  man.  One  owes 
the  other  man  not  merely  recognition  but  respect;  one 
is  not  merely  to  be  aware  that  he  is  there,  but  that  he 
is  there  to  be  respected  and  served.  This  is  the  true 
secret  of  effective  brotherhood.  The  feeling  and  con- 
straint of  brotherliness  is  attained  to  not  by  con- 
descension from  above,  but  by  ascent  from  below. 
One  has  to  climb  up  into  the  experience  of  brotherhood 
from  a  sense  of  personal  insignificance.  The  average 
man  is  never  sufficiently  low  to  begin  the  climb. 

And  it  is  on  this  plane  of  brotherhood  that  a  man 
becomes  conscious  of  true  human  dignity.  If  he  feels 
a  king,  it  is  as  a  king  among  kings.  Self-realization 
begins  in  humility  and  is  achieved  in  service.  '  The  one 
way  to  miss  oneself  is  to  serve  oneself.  The  man  who 
is  for  ever  anxious  about  realizing  and  expressing 
himself  is  really  losing  himself.  It  is  the  man  who  is 
always  careful  of  his  dignity  who  sooner  or  later  loses 
it.  He  usually  makes  himself  ridiculous,  and  men  call 
him  a  pompous  fool.  He  who  has  a  real  dignity  never 
thinks  of  it  and  leaves  it  to  look  after  itself.  The 
man  who  sets  up  a  machinery  to  safeguard  his  self- 
respect  sets  up  an  engine  which  will  in  the  end  crush 
his  self-respect.  It  is  the  old  principle  of  Jesus  that 
he  who  would  find  himself  and  keep  himself,  his  soul, 
his  life,  must  be  content  to  lose  them  all. 

The  weakness  and  the  peril  of  the  man  in  the  street 
is  that  he  has  never  learnt  this  lesson  or  has  forgotten 
it.  His  life  gathers  around  himself.  Save  only  for 
the  necessary  intimacies  of  business,  and  possibly  for 


38  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

a  small  circle  of  friends,  he  cuts  himself  away  from 
the  common  life  of  his  fellows.  Only  within  his  family 
circle  has  he  a  quick  sense  of  duty  or  obligation  to 
others.  It  is  true  that  he  sometimes  gives  a  copper 
to  an  importunate  mendicant,  moved  perhaps  by  some 
real  but  feeble  impulse  of  pity,  or  it  may  be  only  to 
purchase  a  pennyworth  of  relief  to  his  own  feelings. 
It  is  not  that  he  is  incapable  of  kindness,  but  his 
kindness  is  spasmodic  and  fragmentary,  in  no  sense  a 
steady  principle.  He  is  not  in  any  conscious  organic 
relation  to  the  common  life  of  his  fellow  men.  This 
does  not  arise  from  any  strongly  conceived  and  delib- 
erate ideas  about  the  virtues  of  independence  and  self- 
reliance,  but  from  the  fact  that  he  is  asleep.  He  may 
sometimes  talk  foolishly  about  keeping  himself  to  him- 
self, but  that  does  not  indicate  a  policy  of  exclusive- 
ness ;  rather,  one  of  sheer  ignorance  and  stupidity.  He 
is  not  selfish  in  the  little  things  of  life;  but  he  is  selfish, 
criminally  selfish,  in  the  big  things,  and  he  does  not 
know  it.  He  tacitly — probably  in  semi-consciousness 
of  it  only — expects  the  world  to  revolve  around  him- 
self, and  sometimes  gets  so  far  as  to  think  it  does. 
Generally,  however,  he  inclines  to  quarrel  with  it  be- 
cause it  does  not.  A  great  deal  of  the  endemic  dis- 
satisfaction and  criticism  of  the  street  is  due  to  the 
world's  failure  to  give  the  man  in  the  street  what  he 
thinks  is  his  due.  It  does  not  occur  to  him  that  the 
failure  is  not  the  world's  but  his  own. 

The  average  man  is  hardly  interested  in  anything 
that  does  not  bring  in  some  immediate  grist  to  his 
/mill.  It  does  not  strike  him  that  just  because  he  is  a 
member  of  society  he  is  under  obligation  to  do  things 
that  will  bring  no  grist  to  his  mill.  Take,  for  instance, 


THE  ECLIPSE  OF  THE  OTHER  MAN     39 

his  attitude  to  municipal  government.  He  is  often 
hardly  aware  that  there  is  such  a  thing.  He  has,  be- 
fore now,  been  known  to  be  ignorant  of  the  name  of 
the  municipality  in  which  he  lives.  So  long  as  the 
streets  are  kept  well  cleaned  and  well  lighted,  and  the 
main  drainage  is  properly  cared  for,  and  the  town  clock 
keeps  good  time,  so  long  as  he  is  not  put  to  inconveni- 
ence or  discomfort,  he  is  content  to  let  things  go.  He 
so  far  fails  to  realize  that  he  is  directly  responsible 
for  the  proper  conduct  of  municipal  business  that 
he  only  very  rarely  troubles  to  vote  at  the  election  of 
municipal  councillors.  At  the  London  County  Council 
Election  in  1910  only  55  per  cent,  of  the  electorate 
voted.  Sometimes  the  apathy  of  the  average  man  deliv- 
ers the  municipality  into  the  hands  of  corrupt  men,  and 
then  he  turns  round,  and  in  his  own  sweeping  way  de- 
clares that  men  only  go  on  public  bodies  for  what  they 
can  make  out  of  it.  The  truth  is — and  having  regard 
to  the  great  lack  of  interest  in  municipal  affairs,  it  is  a 
matter  of  no  little  surprise — that  there  is  compara- 
tively very  little  corruption  in  British  municipal  life. 

It  is  only  just  to  concede  that  the  average  man 
is  not  unmoved  by  the  sight  of  real  suffering  or  of  a 
concrete  wrong.  That  is  what  was  meant  when  it  was 
said  that  he  is  not  selfish  in  little  things,  and  that  he 
is  capable  of  spasmodic  bursts  of  kindness.  But  he 
breaks  down  altogether  when  the  evil  is  on  a  large 
scale  or  some  distance  away.  He  sees  a  man  run  over 
in  the  street,  and  he  is  all  pity.  But  a  tremendous  col- 
liery or  railway  accident  far  away  hardly  excites  more 
than  a  passing  remark.  The  cry  of  fallen  and  broken 
men  and  women  fails  to  find  him.  He  sees  a  little 
child  badly  treated  by  a  ruffian,  and  he  is  ready  to 


40  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

knock  the  rufifian  down.  But  the  brutal  savagery  of  a 
civilization  which  kills  its  infants  by  the  thousand 
every  year,  and  maims  and  handicaps  other  thousands 
who  escape  the  killing,  by  the  ignorance  and  the  greed 
which  it  tolerates,  leaves  him  unmoved.  The  infant 
mortality  in  this  country,  the  wholesale  slaughter  (for 
it  is  nothing  else)  of  thousands  upon  thousands  of 
little  children  is  a  far  greater  menace  to  the  Empire 
than  a  thousand  German  Dreadnoughts.  Yet  the  num- 
ber of  people  to  whom  an  uneasy  thought  concerning 
this  matter  occurs  is  probably  exceedingly  small.  The 
average  man,  like  the  Priest  and  Levite  in  the  parable, 
"  passes  by  on  the  other  side,"  because  it  does  not 
pay  him  to  step  aside  to  save  a  soul,  because  the 
straightening  out  of  the  social  tangle  brings  no  grist 
to  his  mill.  When  Jeremiah  lamented  the  evil  case  of 
his  captive  people  and  sang  their  sorrows,  he  cried, 
"Is  it  nothing  to  you,  all  ye  that  pass  by?"  And 
right  out  of  the  heart  of  our  British  life  to-day  rises 
the  cry  of  broken  men  and  women  and  stunted  chil- 
dren, of  the  innocent  blood  of  babes,  "  Is  it  nothing  to 
you,  all  that  ye  pass  by?  "  And  hundreds  and  thou- 
sands of  average  men  virtually  answer,  "  Nothing." 
The  average  man  stands  to-day  outside  all  the  big 
hopes  and  all  the  big  fights  of  humanity.  Jesus  Christ 
was  an  outsider  in  His  day  because  others  made  Him 
so.  The  average  man  of  to-day  is  an  outsider  because 
he  makes  everybody  else  an  outsider. 

And  the  law  works  out.  He  is  surely  and  thor- 
oughly losing  his  soul.  Because  he  is  living  to  himself, 
he  is  losing  himself.  Consider  the  miser — the  shrink- 
age of  heart,  the  hardening  of  all  the  tenderer  emo- 
tions, the  decline  of  faith  and  hope  and  love,  and  of 


THE  ECLIPSE  OF  THE  OTHER  MAN     41 

everything  that  goes  to  make  life  rich  and  abundant. 
This  same  thing  is  happening  slowly  but  with  a  trag- 
ical certainty  in  the  lives  of  a  million  average  men  to- 
day. They  hoard  their  love,  their  faith,  their  hope,  all 
the  deep  potencies  of  their  souls,  and  by  so  doing  damn 
their  souls.  The  Greek  word  from  which  comes  the 
word  "  idiot  "  signifies  merely  a  private  person.  But 
the  idea  of  detachment  and  self-centredness  has  so 
gathered  around  the  word  that  it  means  to  us  a  man  in- 
capable of  interests  outside  himself.  The  average  man 
is  not  many  removes  from  this  awful  blankness.  Mr. 
Chesterton  starts  his  apologetic  for  Christianity  from 
the  lunatic  asylum.  Hanwell,  he  says,  is  full  of  peo- 
ple who  believe  in  themselves.  Self-isolation  is  the 
root  of  idiocy.  No  man  ever  lost  his  reason  because 
he  believed  he  was  generally  loved,  but  a  great  many 
have  lost  their  reason  because  they  thought  they  were 
universally  hated.  Whether  their  isolation  is  due  to 
the  egotism  of  self-conceit  or  of  self-contempt  the  end 
is  much  the  same.  This  is  the  inevitable  penalty  of 
cutting  oneself  adrift  from  the  main  current  of  life, 
of  imagining  that  the  whole  universe  ought  to  revolve 
round  oneself.  Swelled  head  is  a  prolific  cause  of 
softening  brain.  The  law  holds  good  on  every  side. 
Selfishness  involves  a  man  in  a  thousand  impoverish- 
ments and  deprivations ;  that  which  we  vainly  conceive 
will  make  us  opulent  makes  us  paupers  and  dotards. 
Selfish  living  is  suicide  by  slow  starvation.  It  is  the 
inevitable  end  of  the  man  who  has  no  concern  for  the 
other  man. 

Perhaps  not  the  least  tragical  aspect  of  this  matter 
is  the  amount  of  vital  force  that  is  lost  in  the  narrow 
selfish  life.     The  crust  of  selfishness  conducts  neither 


42  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

light  nor  heat.  The  Hght  and  heat  are  bottled  up 
and  lost.  Suppose  all  the  heat  and  light  that  are 
suppressed  in  a  million  average  men  to-day  were  to 
be  liberated !  We  should  begin  to  see  the  rising  walls 
of  the  New  Jerusalem  to-morrow.  But  the  causes  of 
God  and  man  are  languishing  to-day  because  of  the 
selfishness  of  the  average  man.  The  missionary  enter- 
prise of  the  Church,  the  momentous  social  movements 
of  our  time,  these  are  dragging  because  so  many  of 
us  are  spending  on  ourselves  what  we  were  meant  to 
spend  upon  the  world.  Selfishness  entails  not  only 
lost  souls  but  a  lost  world.  We  sometimes  hear  of 
the  unused  energy  of  nature,  of  the  tides,  waterfalls 
and  the  like,  power  that  might  be  harnessed  to  in- 
dustrial uses.  But  what  of  all  the  wasted  unused 
power  of  mind  and  heart,  of  speech  and  sympathy,  of 
love  and  hope  and  faith,  that  might  be  harnessed  to 
the  chariot  of  God  (which  is  also  the  chariot  of  man), 
and  which  is  stagnating  and  wasting  away,  what  time 
the  world  is  calling  aloud  for  it,  and  dying  for  the  need 
of  it,  just  because  the  Average  Man  has  lost  sight 
of  the  Other  Man? 


IV 

THE  BLIGHT  OF  SHALLOWNESS 

"  'WSRAEL  doth  not  know,  my  people  doth  not 
a  consider^  this  was  the  prophet's  lament  long 
■^  centuries  ago;  and  ever  since,  all  the  great 
prophets  and  seers  and  leaders  have  uttered  the  same 
complaint.  From  Isaiah  to  Mazzini  comes,  in  un- 
broken monotone,  the  despairing  indictment:  "My 
people  doth  not  consider."  The  average  man  does  nob 
use  his  brains.  Not  indeed  that  his  brains  are  unused. 
It  is  one  of  his  tragedies  that  his  brains  are  so  fre- 
quently used  by  unscrupulous  and  dishonest  men. 

Yet  if  this  neglect  of  the  power  of  thinking  be  a 
chronic  note  of  the  average  man,  the  average  man  of 
to-day  sins  the  more  in  it  than  his  ancestors.  He  has 
less  excuse  for  not  using  his  mind.  It  is  fashionable 
among  certain  classes  to  depreciate  and  despise  the 
education  which  the  masses  of  the  people  of  this 
country  have  received  in  the  last  generation.  It  cer- 
tainly has  not  been  perfect;  from  the  very  nature  of 
the  case  it  was  for  long  necessarily  experimental,  and 
mistakes  were  inevitable.  But  when  all  allowances 
and  discounts  are  made,  even  if  it  did  not  lead  to  a 
very  effective  use  of  one's  brains,  it  at  least  helped 
one  to  realize  that  the  brains  were  there.  Perhaps  the 
deepest  trouble  is  that  the  education  has  not  gone  far 
enough.     That,  however,  was  not  the  fault  of  the 

43 


44  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

educators,  but  of  those  who  cut  the  education  short. 
When  boys  and  girls  are  taken  away  consistently  from 
school  as  soon  as  they  reach  the  age  of  fourteen,  the 
education  they  have  received  is  as  much  a  peril  as  it 
is  an  advantage.  They  have  received  just  enough 
education  to  make  them  shallow.  Wholly  uneducated 
people  are  sometimes  very  deep.  It  is  little  short 
of  a  miracle  if  a  half-educated  person  is  not  shallow. 
There  is  little  hardihood  in  asserting  that  the  low  age- 
limit  of  school  life  accounts  for  much  of  the  general 
shallowness  of  our  time. 

It  does  not  of  course  follow  that,  because  a  man's 
education  has  extended  beyond  his  fourteenth  year, 
he  then  ceases  to  be  shallow,  or  that  he  has  learnt  to 
use  his  brains.  The  average  man  is  not  unknown  in 
the  universities.  Though  a  man  amass  colossal  learn- 
ing, it  does  not  follow  that  he  can  think.  He  may 
possess  endless  stores  of  materials  for  thought ;  but  it 
is  another  thing  to  have  developed  the  power  of 
thought.  Yet  a  real  education  would  do  the  latter  for  a 
man  rather  more  than  the  former.  We  have  too  long 
conceived  of  education  as  putting  in  rather  than  draw- 
ing out.  We  have  thought  it  our  business  to  stock  the 
mind  rather  than  to  call  out  its  powers.  We  are  pass- 
ing away,  however,  from  this  phase,  and  realizing 
more  and  more  that  the  aim  of  education  is  not  the  im- 
parting of  knowledge  (save  only  as  accessory  to  the 
real  aim),  but  the  awakening,  quickening  and  develop- 
ing of  the  power  of  right  thought  and  right  action. 

When  we  have  had  a  generation  of  rightly  conceived 
and  rightly  directed  popular  education,  we  may  be 
delivered  from  our  modern  affliction  of  shallowness. 
Meantime  we  are  faced  with  a  problem  which  shows 


THE  BLIGHT  OF  SHALLOWNESS       45 

its  acutest  symptoms  on  the  railway  bookstall.  The 
appalling  piles  of  trash  which  are  offered  for  mental 
provender  to  the  traveller  reveal  a  very  feeble  and  dis- 
ordered intellectual  digestion.  There  is,  true,  a  cer- 
tain admixture  of  solid  and  substantial  literature;  but 
it  merely  serves  as  a  respectable  background  to  the 
more  marketable  literature  which  crowds  the  fore- 
ground. It  is  only  fair  to  concede  that,  thanks  to  the 
cheap  re-issues  of  first-rate  literature  and  to  the  gen- 
eral lowering  of  the  price  of  books,  the  average  book- 
stall of  to-day  is  very  different  from  that  of  five  years 
ago.  Still  the  overwhelming  preponderance  of  what 
is  called  "  light  "  literature  is  only  a  reflection  of  the 
fact  that  our  chief  literary  output,  and  therefore  pre- 
sumably our  chief  literary  provender,  consists  of  fic- 
tion. Of  the  8,446  new  books  published  in  1909, 
1,839,  that  is  between  one-fourth  and  one-fifth,  come 
under  the  head  of  novels  and  juvenile  tales,  while  of 
2,279  new  editions  no  fewer  than  1,042  (nearly  one- 
half)  belong  to  the  same  class.  Fiction  is  a  legitimate 
form  of  literary  art,  but  it  can  hardly  be  maintained 
that  the  artistic  qualities  of  current  fiction  are  gener- 
ally very  high,  or  that  it  is  read  on  account  of  those 
qualities.  At  least  it  scarcely  indicates  a  wholesome 
condition  of  popular  literary  taste  that  there  should 
have  been  as  many  new  novels  and  new  editions  of 
novels  published  in  1909  as  new  works  and  new  edi- 
tions of  belles-lettres,  works  of  history,  biography, 
theology,  poetry,  and  the  drama  put  together.  It 
points  to  a  prevailing  shallowness  which  finds  satisfac- 
tion in  the  thinnest  of  mental  provender. 

In  the  matter  of  periodical  literature  the  case  is  even 
worse.    It  is  perhaps  unfair  to  judge  the  case  altogether 


46  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

from  the  railway  bookstall,  because  railway  travelling 
naturally  lends  itself  to  reading  of  the  "  lighter  "  sort. 
Neither  is  it  one's  complaint  against  the  enormous  cur- 
rency of  this  kind  of  literature  that  it  is  amusing. 
Amusing,  even  comic,  literature  is  necessary  and  legiti- 
mate ;  for  God  made  the  laughter  of  things  as  well  as 
their  tears.  One's  complaint  rather  is  that  this  litera- 
ture is  nothing  but  amusing,  and  that  it  hardly  recog- 
nizes that  a  man  has  appetite  or  taste  for  that  which  is 
not  flippant  and  trivial.  The  humor  of  the  professedly 
humorous  periodicals  rarely  rings  true,  for  it  does  not 
touch  the  deep  springs  of  the  soul.  It  is  humor  made 
to  order,  pure  verbal  horseplay.  True  comedy  is  al- 
ways too  near  the  tragedy  of  things  to  be  merely  comic. 
It  is  barely  a  step  from  the  laughter  to  the  tears  of 
things  in  human  life.  Compare  for  instance  our 
great  weekly  humorist  Punch  with  some  of  his  con- 
temporaries. The  one  is  full  of  comedy,  the  others 
are  only  comic,  simply  because  the  one  is  spontaneous 
and  true,  the  others  manufactured  and  unnatural — 
which  means  that  Punch  is  greatly  human  and  the 
others  are  not.     True  humor  is  never  shallow. 

A  similar  inference  might  legitimately  be  drawn 
from  the  present  state  of  the  daily  press.  The 
"  scrappy  "  press  is  a  sign  of  the  times;  and  the  older 
tradition  of  solid  serious  journalism  seems  to  be  in  a 
bad  way.  The  old  newspaper  had  certainly  something 
elephantine  and  ponderous  about  it.  It  was  stodgy  and 
respectable;  but  it  was  at  least  truthful.  The  new 
newspaper,  because  it  is  so  scrappy,  if  it  is  not  untruth- 
ful (though  it  is  sometimes  that),  is  hardly  ever  more 
than  half  truthful.  It  selects  what  it  believes  will  suit 
the  appetite  of  its  readers,  the  spicy,  the  sensational. 


THE  BLIGHT  OF  SHALLOWNESS        47 

the  curious.  It  does  not  tell  the  whole  truth  about 
anything.  The  mischief  with  the  old  style  of  news- 
paper was  that  it  was  not  interesting;  the  mischief 
with  the  new  is  that  it  sacrifices  everything  in  order  to 
be  furiously  interesting.  It  is  superficial,  and  inten- 
tionally superficial.  The  modern  newspaper  assumes 
that  the  average  man  is  shallow  and  makes  itself  shal- 
low to  suit.  The  success  of  the  method  is  proved  by 
the  immense  fortunes  which  the  average  man  has  be- 
stowed upon  some  modern  newspaper  proprietors. 

But  here  we  come  upon  a  curious  paradox.  While 
the  policy  of  the  modern  newspaper  is  determined  by 
the  average  man,  the  politics  of  the  average  man  are 
very  largely  determined  by  the  newspaper.  He  has 
ceased  to  exercise  independent  judgment.  His  news- 
paper supplies  him  with  a  formula,  and  all  the  king's 
horses  and  all  the  king's  men  cannot  separate  him 
from  it.  He  repeats  his  party  formula  automatically, 
if  he  is  sufficiently  moved  to  join  a  party  at  all.  Of 
reasoned  and  rational  ground  for  his  shibboleth  he 
has  none.  He  takes  up  positions  concerning  which 
he  has  never  occupied  himself  with  an  hour's  hard 
thinking. 

One  meets  this  lack  of  independence  and  originality 
on  every  side.  The  average  man  is  a  borrower  and 
an  imitator.  He  has  nothing  of  his  own.  The  capacity 
for  imitation  is  a  natural  and  necessary  endowment; 
and  up  to  a  certain  point  its  value  is  beyond  measure. 
It  is  through  imitation  that  the  child  learns  to  adjust 
himself  fully  to  his  physical  and  social  environment. 
The  thousand  and  one  amenities  that  grease  the  wheels 
of  the  social  machine  are  the  products  of  imitation. 
In  some  things  we  tacitly  (and  rightly)  agree  to  do 


48  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

what  everyone  else  does.  But  we  carry  this  too  far. 
Even  in  so  trivial  a  matter  as  dress,  we  do  not  hold 
ourselves  free  to  exercise  an  independent  judgment. 
Somebody  sets  a  fashion,  and  we  must  needs  follow  it 
regardless  of  any  consideration  of  its  suitability.  Here 
no  great  amount  of  harm  is  done.  At  the  worst  it 
only  makes  for  a  certain  external  monotony  of  style. 
But  there  are  regions  in  which  this  habit  is  symptom- 
atic of  a  good  deal.  During  the  month  of  May,  for  in- 
stance, nearly  everybody  asks  somebody,  "  Have  you 
been  to  the  Academy  ?  "  Because  it  is  the  fashion  to  go 
every  year  to  see  a  display  of  generally  mediocre  pic- 
tures, we  must  needs  go.  But  it  hardly  strikes  us  that 
it  would  be  very  much  worth  while  to  go  occasionally 
to  see  and  study  the  great  artistic  achievements  which 
are  gathered  into  our  public  galleries.  The  claptrap 
which  one  hears  at  the  Royal  Academy  simply  reveals 
the  fact  that  a  great  proportion  of  the  visitors  could 
hardly  look  with  patience,  not  to  speak  of  intelligence, 
at  a  Titian  or  a  Raphael  or  a  Rembrandt.  We  are  fol- 
lowers of  a  fashion,  unthinking  devotees  of  the  new.  A 
thing  is  not  necessarily  bad  or  poor  because  it  is  new 
— even  the  "  Odyssey  "  and  Hamlet  were  new  once — 
but  it  is  a  very  feeble  and  poor  thing  to  worship  a  thing 
just  because  it  is  new.  Yet  it  is  the  habit  of  our  day. 
We  bring  offerings  to  the  altar  of  "  the  latest  " ;  and 
the  name  of  our  favorite  deity  is  Novelty. 

With  some  of  us  it  is  all  the  other  way.  If  we  are 
not  enthusiastic  admirers  of  the  new,  we  are  violent 
partisans  of  the  old.  If  we  are  going  to  follow  any- 
thing without  question  it  is  safer  to  follow  the  old; 
for  the  old  has  stood  the  test  of  time,  and  that  is  some 
presumption  in  its  favor.     But  the  old  is  very  often 


THE  BLIGHT  OF  SHALLOWNESS       49 

much  the  worse  for  wear.  Time  does  "  make  ancient 
good  uncouth."  H  it  is  bad  to  worship  the  new  because 
it  is  new,  it  is  no  less  bad  to  worship  the  old  merely  be- 
cause it  is  old.  The  man  who  boasts  that  he  is  old- 
fashioned  is  doing  as  silly  a  thing  as  one  who  should 
boast  himself  new-fangled.  One  should  have  as  intel- 
ligible and  intelligent  a  reason  for  following  the  old  as 
the  new.  But  there  is  this  difference  between  the  cult 
of  the  old  and  the  cult  of  the  new;  the  worship  of  the 
new  is  generally  the  foolishness  of  the  young  average 
man;  the  worship  of  the  old  is  the  frailty  of  the  old 
average  man.  This  "  tendency  to  leave  the  old  undis- 
turbed," says  a  modern  philosopher,  "  leads  to  what 
we  know  as  '  old-fogyism.'  A  new  idea  or  a  fact 
which  would  entail  extensive  rearrangement  of  the 
previous  system  of  beliefs  is  always  ignored  or  ex- 
cluded from  the  mind  in  case  it  cannot  be  sophistically 
interpreted  so  as  to  tally  harmoniously  with  the  sys- 
tem. We  have  all  conducted  discussions  with  middle- 
aged  people,  overpowered  them  with  our  reasons, 
forced  them  to  admit  our  contentions,  and  a  week  later 
found  them  back  as  secure  and  constant  in  their  old 
opinion  as  if  they  had  never  conversed  with  us  at  all. 
We  call  them  '  old  fogies,'  but  there  are  young  fogies 
too.  Old-fogyism  begins  at  a  younger  age  than  we 
think.  I  am  almost  afraid  to  say  so,  but  I  believe  that 
in  the  majority  of  human  beings  it  begins  about 
twenty-five."  There  are  very  few  who  cannot  confirm 
this  from  personal  experience.  But  in  any  case,  the] 
extreme  fluidity  of  the  new-fashioned  person,  and  the 
thick  viscosity  of  the  old-fashioned,  are  both  alike  by-  j 
products  of  brains  unused  and  lying  fallow. 

But  is  shallowness  a  sin?     Can  a  man  help  being 


50  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

shallow?  Is  a  shallow  man  not  born  so?  The  truth 
is,  that  men  make  themselves  or  permit  themselves  to 
become  shallow.  It  is  part  of  the  present  writer's 
contention  that  the  prevailing  shallowness  is  a  conse- 
quence and  a  symptom  of  the  tendency  to  which  must 
be  traced  the  whole  range  of  circumstances  which  are 
now  passing  under  review,  and  of  which  the  diagnosis 
will  occupy  us  later.  It  may  be  permitted  at  this 
point  to  observe  that  this  is,  in  a  sense,  one  of  the  cen- 
tral troubles  of  our  time.  We  do  not  think;  and  this 
cessation  of  thought  is  in  some  respects  as  marked 
within  the  Church  as  it  is  in  the  outer  world.  The 
average  man  in  the  Church  lets  his  minister  think  for 
him;  and  if  that  is  bad  for  him,  I  incline  to  think  it 
is  worse  for  the  minister.  For  that  is  the  beginning 
of  Papacy.  It  is  a  serious  matter  that  Christian  folk 
are  so  easily  prepared  to  take  their  creeds  and  opinions 
ready-made,  and  that,  speaking  generally,  they  lack 
independence  to  challenge  them.  Creeds  and  opinions 
are  no  more  exempt  from  the  ravages  of  time  than  are 
flesh  and  blood.  Perhaps  it  is  that  we  are  afraid  to 
challenge  them ;  and  fear  is  the  only  thing  that  has 
ever  been  able  to  confound  the  truth  for  long.  And 
even  fear  cannot  do  so  for  ever.  It  is  this  kind  of 
temper  that  has  made  possible  the  doctrine  of  infalli- 
bility, whether  of  a  Pope  or  a  Church. 


V 
THE  DISMEMBERMENT  OF  LIFE 

ATYPICAL  average  man  called  on  me  not  long 
ago  on  business;  and  in  the  course  of  conversa- 
tion he  said :  "  If  a  man  cannot  please  himself 
sometimes  and  have  a  good  time,  what  is  the  use  of  liv- 
ing? "  That  is  in  essence  the  average  man's  philoso- 
phy of  life.  It  may  be  expressed  in  other  ways,  but  the 
core  of  it  is  to  please  himself  sometimes,  and  to  have  a 
good  time.  It  was  natural  that  one  should  at  the  time 
recall  an  old  word:  "Even  Christ  pleased  not  Himself." 
The  defect  of  this  view  of  life  is  that  it  does  not 
regard  life  as  a  whole.  It  looks  upon  one  part  of  life 
as  a  burden, a  space  when  a  man  may  not  please  himself 
and  have  a  good  time;  and  it  finds  the  real  joy  of  life 
in  the  residual  time  of  self-pleasing.  There  is  clearly 
something  profoundly  wrong  about  a  view  of  life 
which  supposes  that  there  is  a  necessary  antithesis  be- 
tween work  and  play,  which  makes  the  one  hateful  and 
the  other  pleasant.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  on  any  whole- 
some view  of  life,  work  and  play  are  both  essential  and 
should  therefore  be  pleasurable.  We  cannot  do  the 
serious  business  of  life  efficiently  without  occasional, 
even  regular  relaxation.  All  work  and  no  play  makes 
Jack  a  dull  boy.  Another  way  of  life  is  possible,  a 
way  of  life  in  which  it  is  treated  as  a  whole,  and  in 
which  both  work  and  play  are  regarded  in  the  same 

51 


52  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

spirit,  that  is,  both  of  them  alike  as  subordinate  to, 
and  serving  the  higher  ends  of,  life.  Life  is  not  to  be 
made  up  of  spells  of  work  and  play.  Life  is  a  larger 
thing  than  either,  or  both.  Work  and  play  are  not 
the  ends  but  the  means  of  life.  Life  is  not  independ- 
ent of  them;  but  it  is  above  them.  It  is  an  organic 
v^hole  which  cannot  be  chopped  up  into  separate  parts. 
Yet  it  is  the  penalty  we  have  to  pay  for  living  at 
this  period  that  there  are  very  few  of  us  indeed  that 
have  not  succumbed  to  this  disintegrating  view  of  life. 
"  Life,"  said  George  Meredith,  "  is  a  little  holding  lent 
to  do  a  mighty  labor."  If  a  man  wants  to  cultivate 
a  piece  of  ground  properly,  he  must  have  a  fairly  clear 
idea  of  what  he  wants  to  get  out  of  it ;  and  it  is  only 
when  he  has  such  an  idea  that  he  is  in  a  position  to 
settle  the  arrangement  of  the  ground,  the  size  of  the 
plots  and  borders.  To  cultivate  it  at  haphazard,  to 
attend  to  it  in  a  casual  way,  is  to  court  failure.  Yet 
this  is  what  most  people  are  doing  with  the  fairest 
garden  that  they  will  ever  have  the  opportunity  of 
cultivating.  The  whole  and  only  policy  is  "  go  as  you 
please."  Here  is  a  patch  used,  shall  we  say,  as  the 
kitchen-garden,  the  part  occupied  with  our  daily  work, 
the  routine  of  more  or  less  uninteresting  activity  by 
which  we  gather  the  necessary  bread  and  cheese. 
This  particular  area  has  to  be  attended  to;  but  it  is 
usually  attended  to  in  the  spirit  that  the  sooner  it  is 
done  with  the  better.  In  some  gardens  there  is  no 
such  area  at  all,  for  there  are  a  good  many  folk  who  do 
not  need  to  work  for  their  daily  bread.  Some  of  them 
are  in  this  condition  because  they  have  tilled  their 
ground  so  well  that  they  have  enough  left  over  for 
future  necessities  without  continuing  to  labor.     There 


THE  DISMEMBERMENT  OF  LIFE       53 

are  others  who  were  born  into  it;  and  many  of  these 
are  apt  to  think  it  something  of  a  disgrace  to  have  a 
kitchen-garden  at  all,  and  to  regard  those  who  have  to 
work  for  their  living  as  belonging  to  an  inferior  order. 
This  is  only  a  weak  and  imbecile  kind  of  snobbery. 
But  whether  there  be  a  kitchen-garden  or  not,  there 
are  always  some  flower  beds.  Here  is  a  border  on 
which  we  cultivate  what  is  called  "  society,"  a  depart- 
ment of  life  given  over  to  social  engagements,  some 
of  which  are  useful  and  wholesome,  some  idiotic  and 
contemptible.  Another  patch  is  devoted  to  the  culture 
of  pleasure,  an  area  of  life  in  which  flourish  the 
theatre,  the  ballroom,  or  what  not.  Here  another  plot 
— a  little  one, — on  which  we  try  to  raise  a  little  re- 
ligion, attended  to  perfunctorily  about  the  week-end 
and  left  to  itself  for  the  rest  of  the  seven  days.  Here 
a  parcel  given  over  to  the  cultivation  of  an  attenuated 
and  bloodless  philanthropy,  a  ministry  of  the  poor  not 
altogether  free  from  the  taint  of  patronage,  which 
does  not  come  in  for  much  cultivation  if  some  other 
more  attractive  area  seems  to  call  for  attention.  Most 
people  have  little  bits  of  their  holdings  given  over  to 
such  priceless  interests  as  those  of  home  and  friend- 
ship; and  many  have  small  areas  for  cultivating  the 
flowers  of  art  and  literature.  So  our  life  is  made  up, 
and  in  the  best  of  us  it  amounts  to  little  more  than 
excellent  patchwork.  It  is  true  our  lives  are  very 
full ;  we  pass  on  from  one  patch  to  another  in  breath- 
less haste,  and  we  are  never  at  an  end.  We  are  al- 
ways on  the  move,  and  never  arriving  anywhere;  al- 
way  doing  something,  and  yet  getting  nothing  done. 

We  must  trace  this  tendency  back  in  the  end  to 
a  false  view  of  the  meaning  of  life.    That  false  view  is 


54  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

indeed  itself  the  effect  of  a  still  anterior  cause  which 
we  must  presently  seek  and  examine.  But  life  is  dom- 
inated by  one  of  two  main  philosophies,  the  "  have-a- 
good-time  "  philosophy  or  the  "  getting-on  "  philoso- 
phy. The  latter  is  pre-eminently  the  philosophy  of 
the  young  average  man.  The  middle-aged  average 
man  has  given  it  up  as  something  of  a  bad  job  and  has 
substituted  the  "  have-a-good-time  "  philosophy  for  it. 
There  is  nothing  wrong  with  the  idea  of  getting  on  in 
itself.  In  a  sense,  that  is  the  end  of  life.  A  man 
should  aim  at  progress.  He  should  have  ambitions. 
The  trouble  is  that  getting  on  in  the  modern  view 
is  usually  synonymous  with  making  money.  The 
standard  of  greatness  is  the  multitude  of  things,  espe- 
cially of  dollars  and  cents,  which  a  man  possesses. 

No  one  aims  at  making  money,  of  course,  merely 
for  the  sake  of  possessing  it.  Money  means  some  kind 
of  power.  It  enables  one  to  purchase  a  certain  meas- 
ure of  comfort,  which  is  no  unlawful  thing  until  it 
passes  into  unnecessary  and  superfluous  softness  and 
fatness  of  living.  It  enables  a  man  to  enter  what  is 
called  good  society.  Indeed,  one  of  the  most  search- 
ing criticisms  of  our  time  is  that  the  only  things  left 
which  money  cannot  buy  for  a  man  are  brains  and 
character.  But  though  the  possession  of  money  may 
not  be  regarded  as  an  end  in  itself,  it  is  regarded  as 
a  means  to  purely  selfish  ends. 

It  is  much  the  same  with  whatever  hope  a  man  sets 
his  heart  upon.  Our  pleasures  are  essentially  selfish 
and  peculiarly  useless.  We  do  not  conceive  of  them 
as  means  of  recreation  and  refreshment  for  the  better 
discharge  of  life's  larger  affairs.  They  are  good  fun, 
that  is  all.     We  do  our  athletics  by  proxy.     We  pay 


THE  DISMEMBERMENT  OF  LIFE        55 

others  to  play  our  football,;  and  we  go  and  see  them 
do  it.  The  public  man  too  often  seeks  power  and  pop- 
ularity for  the  gratification  of  purely  selfish  cravings. 
The  preacher  is  tempted  hard  and  often  (and  also 
often  succumbs)  to  forget  the  saving  of  souls  in  the 
effort  to  acquit  himself  brilliantly.  The  politician  for- 
gets statesmanship  in  order  to  get  the  cheers  of  the 
gallery.  The  most  subtle  device  of  Satan  for  the 
undoing  of  a  man's  soul  is  to  tempt  him  to  use  oppor- 
tunities of  public  service  for  the  pursuit  of  selfish  ends. 
There  is  no  prayer  which  should  be  oftener  on  the 
lips  of  the  public  man  than  the  clause  in  the  Moravian 
liturgy:  "From  the  unhappy  desire  of  being  great, 
good  Lord,  deliver  us." 

All  this  points  out  in  the  end  to  the  fact  that  our 
ideals  of  life  have  fallen  into  a  desperate  tangle.  Life 
in  consequence  has  lost  the  note  of  unity,  and  the 
resulting  disintegration  has  forced  its  way  into  the 
deeper  regions  of  the  soul.  It  has  until  a  recent  period 
vitiated  our  educational  ideals  and  methods.  We  are 
only  now,  indeed,  beginning  to  recognize  the  need  of 
organizing  education  from  the  standpoint  of  moral 
action  as  the  end  of  life.  But  no  moral  action  can  ever 
be  adequate  which  does  not  involve  the  whole  man; 
and  the  real  problem  of  education  is  so  to  develop  and 
harness  the  powers  of  the  mind,  intellectual,  aesthetic, 
emotional,  in  such  a  way  that  each  shall  make  its 
own  contribution  to  the  stimulation  and  direction  of 
the  will.  "  Character,"  said  Novalis,  "  is  the  per- 
fectly educated  will";  but  the  education  of  the  will 
entails  the  proper  education  of  the  whole  man,  that 
is  to  say,  his  education  in  the  direction  of  some  one 
ideal  which  shall  gather  up  all  his  various  nature  into 


56  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

one  obedience.  The  average  man  is  suffering  to-day 
from  the  defective  education  of  his  powers,  and  con- 
sequently he  lives  from  hand  to  mouth,  the  creature  of 
any  impulse  that  may  come  along.  He  has  no  steady 
policy,  no  constant  scale  of  values,  no  consistent 
standard  of  judgment.  He  is  incapable  of  seeing  the 
inwardness  of  a  situation,  and  he  has,  because  he  can 
do  no  other,  to  take  things  at  their  face  value.  H  he 
seeks  knowledge,  it  is  for  some  immediate  personal 
ends;  if  he  has  any  dealings  with  art,  it  is  for  certain 
evanescent  personal  satisfactions.  He  lives  in  streaks 
and  patches.  He  has  never  seriously  asked  himself 
why  he  is  here  at  all;  and  it  is  a  very  pertinent  and  a 
very  damaging  criticism  of  his  education  that  it  has 
not  suggested  the  question  to  him.  He  finds  himself 
here,  takes  himself  as  he  finds  himself,  lives  from  hour 
to  hour  as  fancy  or  necessity  may  dictate,  never  dream- 
ing of  the  need  of  linking  the  hours  together  and 
making  them  tell  a  common  continuous  tale.  All  this 
is  a  colossal  waste  of  life. 

And  he  has  only  one  life  to  live.  He  cannot  have 
it  over  again.  Nor  can  he  gather  up  the  patches  and 
make  of  them  one  whole.  For  there  has  been  irrecov- 
erable leakage  of  life  and  strength  in  the  intervals  of 
his  activity.  This  patchwork  mode  of  life  makes  for 
waste,  and  a  waste  that  can  never  be  repaired.  ''  You 
cannot  kill  time,"  said  Thoreau,  "  without  injuring 
eternity." 


VI 

THE  EVIL  SEED 

THE  dissection  of  the  average  man  might  be 
pursued  farther;  but  what  has  already  been 
said  should  be  adequate  to  the  end  in  view — 
to  wit,  a  demonstration  of  the  desperate  tangle  into 
which  the  life  of  the  common  man  has  fallen.  It  may 
be  assumed  without  much  argument  that  all  this  is  the 
product  of  the  prevailing  public  atmosphere  which  our 
average  man  is  regarded  as  embodying.  What,  then, 
are  the  influences  which  have  issued  in  this  muddle 
and  poverty  of  life?  To  what  are  we  to  attribute  the 
lack  of  faith,  the  absence  of  true  fraternity,  of  depth 
and  of  unity  in  the  common  life  of  our  time? 

At  the  risk  of  being  criticised  for  over-facile  gen- 
eralization, I  venture  to  think  that  one  word  covers  the 
whole  ground,  namely.  Materialism.     It  is,  however, 
necessary  to  point  out  that  materialism  may  be  taken 
as  referring  to  two  things,  the  one  a  native  human 
bias   and  the  other  a  theoretic   construction   of   the 
universe.     The  position  which  I  venture  to  take  up  is 
this:  that  the  poverty  and  inadequacy  of  our  modern! 
life  arises  from  this  native  inclination  to  materialism , 
reinforced    by    the    materialistic    tendency    of    the! 
thought  of  the  past  two  generations. 

The  final  demonstration  of  the  truth  of  this  con- 
tention is,  I  think,  to  be  found  in  the  practical  ob- 

57 


58  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

scuration,  in  our  time,  of  the  doctrine  of  a  future  life. 
It  is  true  that  the  average  man  has  not  categorically 
thrown  overboard  his  faith  in  a  future  life ;  in  a  more 
or  less  casual  way  he  hangs  on  to  it.  It  receives 
a  spasmodic  revival  when  the  chill  hand  of  death 
touches  his  child.  But  its  reaction  upon  his  ordinary 
life  is  infinitesimal,  and  the  stimulus  and  the  comfort 
which  a  vivid  faith  in  a  future  life  can  bring  are  prac- 
tically unknown  to  him.  It  is  eloquent  of  the  kind  of 
hopelessness  which  has  overcome  him,  that  he  can  ac- 
quiesce in  the  brokenness  of  his  own  life  and  the  in- 
equality around  him  without  now  and  again  breaking 
out  into  that  temper  of  other-worldliness,  which  does 
at  least  promise  the  possibility  of  redress  in  another 
world.  I  think  it  was  Mr.  Robert  Blatchford  who 
once  told  of  an  old  peasant  in  the  west  of  Ireland  who, 
when  asked  what  it  was  that  he  most  desired  to  see, 
answered :  "  The  Day  of  Judgment,  sir."  The  Jew  of 
the  period  around  the  beginning  of  the  Christian  era 
in  his  desperation  turned  to  Apocalyptic,  grotesque  and 
fantastic  in  form,  but  nevertheless  embodying  a  faith 
that  the  last  word  upon  this  scheme  of  things  would 
be  spoken  from  without  and  not  from  within.  But 
nowadays  we  are  not  even  capable  of  Apocalyptic. 
Apocalyptic  may  have  been  born  of  a  perverted  faith; 
but  we  have  not  even  a  perverted  faith.  We  have 
hardly  any  faith  at  all. 

There  are  some  who  would  persuade  us  that  the 
decline  of  faith  in  a  future  life  is  on  the  whole  a  sign 
of  advance.  The  craving  for  immortality  is  said  to 
be  merely  a  crude  desire  for  self -perpetuation.  But 
it  can  hardly  be  written  off  in  that  summary  way. 
Even   though   one   were   compelled   to   concede   that 


THE  EVIL  SEED  59 

there  is  not  in  the  present  brokenness  of  life  an  argu- 
ment for  faith  in  future  redress  and  compensation, 
the  Hmitations  of  our  present  life  demand  some  such 
faith  if  we  are  not  to  regard  the  universe  as  a  piece 
of  creative  prodigality.  There  are  capacities  v^ithin 
us  which  require  dimensions  broader  than  those  of 
time  and  place  for  their  proper  expansion.  Modern 
psychology  has  tended  more  and  more  to  believe  that 
our  life  is  a  far  deeper  thing  than  we  know,  that  there 
is  incalculable  depth  and  extent  of  life  beyond  the 
threshold  of  consciousness.  But  in  this  it  has  done 
no  more  than  confirm  an  instinct,  an  intuition,  which 
mankind  has  always  possessed.  The  profound  rest- 
lessness of  the  human  spirit,  its  craving  for  movement, 
as  we  see  it  in  the  history  of  the  race,  especially  in 
the  wonderful  western  migrations  of  Iberian,  Celt  and 
Teuton,  bear  witness  to  its  deep  sense  of  a  larger 
destiny  than  its  immediate  environment  can  afford. 
It  is  the  same  story  which  the  writer  of  Hebrews  tells 
in  that  great  processional  in  the  eleventh  chapter, 
where  he  speaks  of  men  who  confessed  themselves 
strangers  and  pilgrims  on  earth  and  sought  a  country 
of  their  own,  a  better,  that  is,  a  heavenly  country. 
The  craving  for  immortality  is  not  merely  a  desire 
for  self-preservation,  for  mere  continuity,  it  is  the 
desire  for  the  opportunity  of  perfect  development. 
It  is  the  passion  for  perfect  freedom. 

It  may  not  be  unrelated  to  all  this  that  religious 
faith  is  far  more  vivid  in  young  countries  than  in  the 
old.  Possibly  emigration  may  have  behind  it  an  un- 
recognized religious  impulse.  Let  it  be  admitted  that 
it  is,  superficially  at  least,  due  to  a  desire  for  better 
material  conditions;  but  beneath  this  is  the  deep  age- 


6o  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

long  craving  for  enlargement  of  life  which  is  not  in 
the  end  to  be  rigorously  differentiated  from  the  desire 
for  immortality.  In  any  case,  it  is  a  curious  circum- 
stance that  the  lawless  lumber  camps  of  Minnesota 
and  the  mining  settlements  of  the  solitary  West  should 
respond  so  spontaneously  and  readily  to  the  appeal  of 
religion.  May  it  not  be  that  the  spirit  of  adventure 
is  at  bottom,  and  unconsciously,  a  rudimentary  phase 
of  faith,  which  is  capable  of  responding  to  its  true 
appointed  stimulus  when  that  is  applied? 

If  this  be  so,  materialism  is  as  fatal  to  the  spirit  of 
adventure  as  it  is  to  belief  in  a  future  life;  and  we 
may  be  right  in  tracing  the  dull  heavy-footedness  of 
modern  England,  the  lack  of  bound  and  spontaneity, 
to  this  cause.  We  may  look  enviously  at  the  spring 
and  zest  of  the  young  nations  of  the  West;  we  do. 
And  when  we  bring  our  thoughts  home  again,  we  be- 
gin inevitably  to  animadvert  upon  the  gray  and  dull 
drabness  of  old  countries.  But  the  difference  is  not  a 
question  of  age.  It  is  fundamentally  a  difference  be- 
tween faith  and  no  faith.  If  the  older  nations  are  fa- 
tigued, it  is  not  because  they  are  senile,  but  becausethey 
are  faithless.  Nations  do  not  grow  old;  and  if  they  be- 
come exhausted  it  is  not  through  process  of  time,  but 
through  the  invasion  of  unbelief.  Materialism  is  the 
most  effective  and  fruitful  cause  of  national  decline. 

The  reasons  for  this  are  not  far  to  seek.  It  might 
indeed  be  argued  that  materialism,  by  diverting  a 
great  deal  of  energy  from  useless  superstitious  prac- 
tices and  turning  it  into  channels  which  lead  to  material 
prosperity,  should  properly  contribute  to  national 
greatness.  But  this  does  not  square  with  historical 
fact.     For  the  natural  sequel  of  materialism  is  neces- 


THE  EVIL  SEED  61 

sarianism,  the  denial  of  freedom;  and  with  the  loss  of 
freedom  vanishes  initiative;  and  inertia  and  lethargy 
follow.  The  only  condition  upon  which  human 
energy  can  be  called  out  to  its  uttermost  is  the  belief 
that  man  is  more  than  the  universe,  possesses  some  en- 
dowment which  may  enable  him  to  master  the  uni- 
verse, and  that  he  is  in  no  sense  merely  a  product  of 
those  hidden  and  mysterious  physical  forces  which 
have  produced  the  sum  of  things  around  him.  He 
must  be  conscious  not  merely  of  difference,  but  in  some 
sense  of  detachment  from  the  universe;  he  must  feel 
that  he  belongs  to  a  higher  region. 

Moreover  the  necessarian  character  of  materialism 
takes  the  heart  out  of  all  moral  sanctions.  Without 
freedom  there  can  be  no  sense  of  responsibility,  and 
consequently  no  such  thing  as  morality.  Morality  can 
have  no  adequate  sanction  save  only  in  the  belief  in  an 
actual  absolute  righteousness  from  which  it  derives. 
Apart  altogether  from  the  question  of  future  rewards 
and  punishments,  the  right  conduct  of  man  towards 
man  can  never  be  guaranteed  in  the  present  state  of 
things  except  upon  the  basis  of  the  stimuli  and  the 
deterrents  provided  by  the  belief  that  such  conduct 
is  required  by  the  ultimate  authority,  whatever  it  be, 
which  always  says  the  last  word  in  the  moral  world. 
In  a  materialistic  construction  of  the  universe  there 
is  no  room  for  an  authoritative  and  absolute  moral 
order;  and  human  flesh  and  blood  is  so  frail, 
that,  bereft  of  that  support,  it  inevitably  slides  into 
anarchy. 

The  proper  antithesis  to  materialism  is  faith,  and 
faith  in  a  personal  moral  God  to  Whom  there  can  al- 
ways be  an  appeal.  Who  can  be  depended  upon  to  rein- 


62  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

force  us  in  our  struggles  to  satisfy  His  demands  and 
Who  is  always  accessible.  Shut  that  door  upon  men 
and  you  involve  them  in  that  tangle  of  hopelessness 
and  moral  impotency  which  breeds  crime  and  suicide 
and  mental  disorder.  For  that  same  reason  material- 
ism puts  a  premium  upon,  or  offers  a  justification  for, 
the  native  streak  of  selfishness  which  we  have  brought 
with  us  out  of  the  jungle  and  the  forest.  We  know 
what  the  ethic  of  the  jungle  and  the  forest  is;  and 
there  are  some  who  have  found  a  scientific  justification 
for  the  prevailing  competitive  anarchy  of  our  modern 
civilization  in  the  fierce  struggles  of  the  animal  world. 
There  is  a  good  deal  of  the  ape  and  the  tiger  left  in  us ; 
and  materialism  can  do  no  other  than  encourage  their 
dominion  over  us.  It  has  no  sanctions  which  can 
evoke  the  spirit  of  fraternity  or  the  temper  of  co- 
i  operation,  save  only  in  the  exploitation  of  the  weak. 
Its  most  characteristic  products  are  the  Trusts. 

This  leads  to  the  conclusion  that  the  real  logical 
outcome  of  the  materialistic  temper  is  that  we  have 
come  to  believe  that  heaven  lies  in  the  possession  of 
[money,  and  in  consequence  of  this  belief  our  modern 
civilization   is  organized  chiefly    for  the  purpose   of 
[money-making  (with  brief  occasional  intervals  of  re- 
llief  provided  for  by  pleasure-seeking).    Those  of  us 
[who  are  not  making  money  want  to  do  so,  and  hope 
that  some  day  we  shall  do  so.     In  the  meantime  we 
are   engaged   in   making   money    for    someone   else. 
Practically    everything   is    subordinated    to    this    one 
thing.     That  complex  of  troubles  which  we  call  the  so- 
cial problem  arises  out  of  this  dominating  fact.    The 
grossly  unequal  distribution  of  wealth  in  our  modern 
civilization  is  due  to  the  money-making  character  of 


THE  EVIL  SEED  63 

our  social  organization;  and  so  long  as  we  tolerate  a 
social  scheme  which  is  built  around  this  idea,  so  long 
we  shall  have  the  social  problem  with  us.  Rival 
jSchemes  of  economic  readjustment  or  fiscal  reorganiza- 
tion will  do  no  more  than  touch  the  surface  of  the 
matter  until  men  are  released  from  the  entirely  dam- 
ning doctrine  that  a  man's  life  consisteth  in  the  num- 
ber and  size  of  his  investments. 

Meantime  this  passion  is  robbing  us  of  both  charac- 
ter and  depth.  What  is  the  meaning  of  that  strange 
and  sinister  word  so  frequently  on  our  lips  that  "  you 
cannot  trust  anyone  nowadays  "  ?  Our  greed  of  money 
is  responsible  for  the  atmosphere  of  distrust  and  sus- 
picion which  prevails  to-day ;  and  this  same  atmosphere 
is  the  judgment  which  we  ourselves  pass  upon  our  com- 
mercial probity.  Is  the  love  of  money  making  us  a  dis- 
honest people  ?  It  is  difficult  to  find  a  certain  ancestry 
for  distrust  unless  we  trace  its  lineage  to  dishonesty. 
By  our  mutual  suspicion  we  are  accusing  ourselves. 

The  influence  of  materialistic  tendencies  is  account- 
able also  for  our  shallowness.  It  affects  us  in  two 
ways.  The  insensate  and  increasing  pace  of  modern 
life  is  a  sufficiently  disturbing  factor  in  the  modern 
situation  to  require  a  section  to  itself.  But  the  materi- 
alistic bias  has  also  been  responsible  for  a  purely  utili- 
tarian type  of  education  which  has  been  fatal  to  all 
true  culture.  We  have  fancied  it  to  be  enough  that 
we  should  equip  the  child  with  just  sufficient  knowl- 
edge to  give  him  a  start  in  life.  The  three  R's  with  a 
few  other  odd  touches  were  supposed  to  furnish  the 
lad  with  enough  mental  capital  to  enable  him  to  fight 
for  himself.  What  we  actually  have  done  is  just  to 
give  him  enough  to  enable  others  to  exploit  him;  and 


64  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

we  have  left  him,  like  a  cake  not  turned,  a  shallow,  de- 
pendent and  often  helpless  individual.  We  are  cer- 
tainly learning  more  wisdom  in  this  connection;  but 
meantime  we  have  produced  an  extent  and  a  persist- 
ency of  shallowness  in  our  common  life  the  evil  effects 
of  which  we  shall  not  outgrow  for  many  long  days. 

The  ill  service  which  scientific  materialism  has  done 
us  is  to  confirm  the  average  man  in  a  way  of  life  from 
which  his  true  well-being  and  his  proper  development 
demand  that  he  should  be  steadily  and  persistently 
called.  No  materialistic  hypothesis  is  in  itself  ade- 
quate to  account  for  human  nature.  There  is  that 
within  man  which  sets  him,  not  in  a  higher  category 
than  the  brute  beast  that  perishes,  but  in  a  wholly  dif- 
ferent region.  The  difference  between  him  and  the 
brute  is  not  a  difference  of  degree,  but  of  kind;  not  a 
difference  in  stage  of  evolution,  but  a  difference  due  to 
an  altogether  distinct  and  unshared  endowment.  It  is 
true  that  he  has  affinities  with  the  brute;  but  there  is 
something  added  to  those  affinities  which  fix  a  great 
gulf  between  him  and  the  brute.  Yet  this  is  a  gulf 
across  which  he  constantly  tends  to  drift,  if  he  be  not 
steadily  recalled  to  his  true  original  course.  Material- 
ism drives  him  inevitably  across  the  gulf;  and  just  be- 
cause this  world  is  so  much  nearer  than  the  other, 
because  material  things  are  more  immediate  and  obvi- 
ous, the  natural  man  stands  in  jeopardy  every  hour. 
He  has  to  be  persistently  reminded  that  his  destiny  lies 
the  other  way;  but  the  materialistic  tendencies  of  our 
time  have  pressed  him  into  that  great  gulf  in  which 
he  has  lost  faith  and  fellowship,  and  in  consequence 
of  which  he  has  declined  into  a  chaos  of  moral  and 
mental  disorder,  of  shallowness  and  despair. 


PART  II 
THE  WILDERNESS 


VII 
THE  VOICE  IN  THE  WILDERNESS 

IT  is  the  easiest  task  in  the  world  to  formulate  an 
indictment  of  one's  own  tirne;  it  is  also  one  of  the 
most  perilous.    "  Social  philosophy  has  to  be  per- 
petually on  its  guard  against  satirists  and  sentimental- 
ists, as  statesmanship  has  to  beware  of  anarchists  and 
fanatics.    Every  age  has  had  its  moralists  who  charged 
it  with  vice,  crime,  and  disease,  who  lauded  an  unreal 
past  and  prophesied  an  impossible  future."  *    It  is  the 
temptation  of  the  stern  moralist  always  to  fall  into  a 
mood  of  "  owlish  pessimism."   On  the  other  hand,  there 
are  those  whose  peculiar  temptation  it  is  to  live  in  a 
temper  of  "  cuckoo  optimism."    The  trouble  with  both  | 
alike  is  that  they  select  thein  data  and  refuse  to  look  ' 
frankly  at  all  the  facts.     There  never  was  an  age  of 
such  absolute  homogeneity  of  quality  throughout  as  to  : 
justify  either  a  thoroughgoing  optimism  or  an  unquali-  ; 
fied  pessimism.     Every  age  is  susceptible  of  drastic 
moral  criticism;  yet  in  every  age  there  are  always,  for 
those  who  have  eyes  to  see,  circumstances  which  make 
for  hope. 

There  has  probably  been  no  period  of  history  of 
which  it  has  not  been  said  that  it  was  a  period  of  tran- 
sition. Human  affairs  are  always  in  a  state  of  flux. 
There  is  no  such  thing  as  stagnation.     Whether  the 

*  Frederic  Harrison,  quoted  in  Public  Opinion,  Oct.  30,  1909. 

67 


68  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

transition  be  from  progress  to  reaction  or  contrariwise, 
there  is  always  some  movement;  and  one  age  is  to  be 
distinguished  from  another  not  only  by  the  direction 
but  also  by  the  velocity  of  the  movement.  There  are 
times  when  the  movement  is  slow;  times  when  men's 
hearts  are  hardened  and  asleep,  and  events  follow  one 
another  in  a  monotonous,  insignificant  procession. 
There  are  other  times  when  the  movement  becomes 
fast  and  furious,  and  the  age  is  at  last  involved  in  a 
tumultuous  confusion  which  seems  to  the  onlooker  to 
be  the  end  of  all  things.  The  student  of  history  who 
looks  back  at  those  periods  from  the  vantage  ground 
of  quieter  times  recognizes  that  the  clamor  and  the 
chaos  were  but  the  last  gasp  of  an  exhausted  epoch 
mingling  with  the  cries  of  great  Mother  Time  in  travail 
with  a  new  era. 

The  course  of  history  is  punctuated  with  such  hap- 
penings as  these — Renascences,  Reformations,  Re- 
vivals, Revolutions.  The  progress  of  the  race  has  not 
been  a  steady  ascent.  Rather  does  it  appear  somewhat 
like  a  weather  chart,  showing  high  peaks  with  inter- 
vening depressions,  yet  on  the  whole  tending  upwards. 
There'are  depths  of  depression  which  the  race  has  left 
behind  for  ever,  to  which  it  will  never  more  descend 
again.  There  are  doubtless  depressions  and  reactions 
yet  ahead  of  it  which,  if  historical  analogies  are  to 
hold  good,  it  cannot  escape.  But  it  will  scale  in  the 
days  to  come  heights  more  splendid  than  any  it  has  yet 
attained.  Painfully,  it  is  true,  yet  with  no  uncertainty, 
here  a  little,  there  a  little,  it  will  press  on  until  it  come 
at  last  to  the  City  of  God.  A  far  cry,  no  doubt,  yet 
] "  there  is  no  hour  of  human  existence  which  does  not 
■  draw  on  to  the  perfect  day." 


THE  VOICE  IN  THE  WILDERNESS      69 

To  the  man  of  understanding  there  has  never  yet 
been  an  hour  of  depression  in  the  movement  of  the 
race  which  did  not  yield  anticipations  of  the  coming 
ascent.  The  period  before  the  Renaissance — indeed, 
the  whole  of  the  sterile  millennium  which  went  before 
it — is  studded  by  oases  of  enlarging  hope,  hope 
which  at  length  materialized,  and  that  richly.  The 
Protestant  Reformation  cast  deep,  significant  shadows 
before.  The  French  Revolution — which,  despite  its 
bloody  excesses,  established  the  modern  reign  of  liberty 
— may  be  traced  back  step  by  step  to  distant  fruitful 
fountain-heads.  It  is  ordained  that,  amid  all  the  des- 
perate aridity  of  times  of  reaction,  influences  shall  be 
set  afoot,  and  in  due  time  converge  on  one  point;  and 
from  that  point  they  issue  forth  in  a  mighty  stream 
which  bears  on  its  flood  some  new  principle  and  ideal 
of  life  to  fertilize  and  renew  the  world.  And  so,  out 
of  the  wilderness  of  the  most  utter  exhaustion,  there 
never  fails,  for  those  who  have  ears  to  hear,  to  come 
the  voice  which  bids  men  prepare  the  way  of  the  Lord. 

It  was  the  distinction  of  the  prophet  that  he  heard 
this  voice  and  echoed  it;  and  his  hearing  was  no  mere 
subjective  fancy.  For  the  prophet  was  not  only  a 
moralist  but  an  historian,  and  an  historian  who  under- 
stood the  great  tendencies  which  operate  unseen  be- 
neath the  outer  flux  of  human  affairs.  He  heard  the 
voice  in  the  very  movements  of  his  own  time,  and, 
whether  he  proclaimed  deliverance  or  calamity,  it  was 
with  direct  reference  to  past  and  current  history. 
Apocalyptic  proceeded  on  other  lines.  Prophecy  saw 
the  future  issuing  out  of  the  womb  of  the  past — inevi- 
tably, yet  not  without  travail  or  tumult;  but  Apocalyp- 
tic saw  the  future  breaking  like  a  bolt  out  of  the  blue 


70  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

across  the  order  of  history.  Prophecy,  anchored  in 
history,  remained  sane,  though  it  passed  away.  The 
apocalyptic  hope,  with  no  such  moorings,  assumed  gro- 
tesque and  impossible  shapes.  This  is  not  to  say  that 
the  apocalyptic  hope  was  itself  a  false  or  unreal  thing. 
On  the  contrary,  the  apocalyptic  hope  is  born  of  a  quite 
sound  spiritual  instinct;  but  the  literature  which  pre- 
serves the  history  of  it  shows  that  it  lacked  the  intel- 
lectual discipline  which  would  have  delivered  it  from 
the  two  pitfalls  into  which  it  fell — namely,  the  kind  of 
machinery  of  physical  and  political  portent  which  it 
set  up,  and  its  misreading  of  the  conditions  which 
might  precipitate  an  apocalypse.  It  belongs  to  our 
purpose  to  consider  the  present  and  permanent  religious 
content  of  the  apocalyptic  hope;  it  will  be  sufficient  at 
this  point  merely  to  indicate  that  it  is  a  factor  of  which 
some  recognition  must  be  made.  Meantime,  it  is  rather 
our  business  to  follow,  however  far  off  and  however 
haltingly,  the  footsteps  of  the  prophet,  and  to  consider 
things  as  they  are,  and  to  inquire  what  manner  of 
promise  they  have  for  the  future  and  in  what  direction 
they  seem  to  be  tending. 

Over  against  the  materialism  in  which  the  average 
man  is  involved,  the  prevailing  materialism  of  the 
atmosphere  of  our  time,  there  is  certainly  a  very  con- 
siderable feeling  of  ufirggt.  "  Compared,"  says  a  re- 
cent writer,  '  with  twenty  or  even  ten  years  ago,  men 
are  talking  a  new  language.  They  are  thinking  new 
thoughts.  They  are  dreaming  new  dreams.  They  only 
partly  know  that  their  language  and  their  dreams  are 
new.  These  visions  do  not  find  expression  in  Lombard 
Street,  in  the  Bourse,  at  a  directors'  meeting,  in  the 
club.    Money-changers  have  dreamed  no  dreams  from 


THE  VOICE  IN  THE  WILDERNESS      ^\ 

the  day  they  were  driven  from  the  temple  by  Christ. 
At  most,  men  of  big  business  have  but  a  subconscious 
suggestion  of  the  change  which  is  impending,  gained 
from  the  headhnes  of  the  daily  press.  But  their  sons  are 
coming  home  from  the  universities  with  a  new  light  in 
their  eyes.  Their  wives  are  coming  home  from  the 
cathedral  with  a  new  religion  from  the  pulpit.  Even 
the  representatives  of  privilege  in  Parliament  are  uncon- 
sciously reflecting  the  new  spirit  which  is  in  the  air."  * 

This  writer  is  thinking  particularly  of  the  social 
and  democratic  movement  and  legislation  in  Germany, 
England,  France,  Switzerland,  and  Denmark;  but  it 
is  hardly  to  be  questioned  that  his  words  apply  over 
a  much  wider  range.  It  is  beyond  doubt  that  the  most 
potent  influence  in  modern  political  life  is  the  new  col- 
lective consciousness  which  has  permeated  the  whole 
of  the  West.  It  Is  a  big,  momentous  fact,  the  whole 
implications  of  which  we  can  yet  only  partially  discern. 
The  present  situation  may  be  well  described  as  one  in 
which  a  selfish  materialism  is  set  over  against  the  as- 
cendant principle  of  brotherhood,  in  which,  indeed,  the 
issue  between  them  is  already  joined;  and  the  confusion 
of  our  time  is  simply  the  confusion  of  the  battlefield. 

Things  have  been  preparing  for  this  Armageddon 
for  many  days.  Mazzini  with  prophetic  insight  de- 
clared more  than  half  a  century  ago  that  just  as  Indi- 
vidualism had  been  the  ruling  principle  of  the  period 
between  the  Protestant  Reformation  and  the  French 
Revolution,  so  the  principle  of  the  following  epoch 
would  be  Collectivism  or  Association.     The  century 

*Mr.  F.  C.  Howe,  of  the  New  York  Outlook  (Feb.  1910),  in  an 
account  of  his  impressions  of  a  six  months'  study  of  the  industrial 
democracy  of  Europe. 


^2  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

following  the  French  Revolution  has  been  occupied 
with  the  establishment,  the  extension,  and  the  purifica- 
tion of  democratic  ideals;  and  we  are  at  last  entering 
upon  the  new  period  (which  sound  democratic  ideals 
alone  could  make  possible)  of  collectivism  and  brother- 
hood. We  have  seen  it  coming  in  the  legislation  of  the 
last  generation  and  more,  in  which  the  ideal  of  col- 
lective responsibility  has  again  and  again  been  recog- 
nized; and  now  the  tide  is  well  on  us.  In  Germany 
"  the  fear  of  poverty,  the  accidents  of  industry,  and 
old  age  are  relieved  by  pension  schemes.  There  are 
schemes  for  insurance  against  sickness  and  loss  of 
work  as  well  as  the  most  wonderful  tuberculosis  sana- 
toria, convalescent  homes,  and  hospitals."  And  Eng- 
land is  following  hard  upon  the  heels  of  Germany. 

)This  same  spirit  is  manifesting  itself  in  very  strong 
tendency  towards  international  peace.  There  never  was 
a  time  when  the  prospects  of  abolishing  war  were  so 
bright;  and  the  Arbitration  Treaty  proposed  between 
Great  Britain  and  the  United  States  indicates  merely 
the  beginning  of  a  ferment  of  peace  sentiment  which  is 
bound,  in  time,  to  embrace  all  the  great  nations.  The 
growing  spirit  of  brotherhood  is  rapidly  making  war 
impossible. 

It  is  clear  that  this  tendency  will  issue  in  an  in- 
creased security  and  ease  of  life;  but  it  can  hardly  be 
supposed  that  security  and  ease  of  life  are  adequate 
ends  in  themselves  for  the  powerful  tendencies  that  are 
at  work  at  the  present  time.  It  is  probably  largely  due 
to  the  ubiquitous  materialism  of  the  time,  that  even  the 
sentiments  of  brotherhood  embody  themselves  almost 
exclusively  in  demands  for  economic  readjustments 
and  improved  physical  environment.    But  surely  these 


THE  VOICE  IN  THE  WILDERNESS      73 

things  are  merely  preparatory  to  some  larger  purpose; 
and  it  is  perhaps  the  most  salient  criticism  of  our 
modern  collectivistic  experiments  that  we  have  not 
quite  clearly  formulated  the  thing  we  are  ultimately 
aiming  at.  The  Social  Reformer  has,  no  doubt,  in  his 
mind  a  pretty  definite  picture  of  the  kind  of  economic 
paradise  that  he  desires;  but  he  has  still  to  define  the 
kind  of  being  that  he  wants  to  produce  in  this  paradise. 
Human  life  cannot  be  static,  even  in  a  paradise.  The 
Chicago  politician  who  said  that  he  did  not  wait  to 
hitch  his  wagon  to  a  star,  but  that  he  hitched  it  to 
anything  that  was  going  his  way,  was  smart  and  plausi- 
ble; but  he  was  profoundly  wrong.  Short  views  are 
entirely  precarious;  and  it  is  only  by  having  a  star  and 
keeping  it  in  view  that  one  can  judge  with  assurance 
the  soundness  of  each  step  one  takes. 

Something  is  going  to  happen.  These  deep,  far- 
reaching  movements  are  not  upon  us  for  nothing.  But 
what  is  going  to  happen?  Is  all  our  social  endeavor 
by  means  of  legislation  and  otherwise  to  issue  only 
in  more  loaves  and  fishes,  with  a  little  more  milk  and 
honey  thrown  in  ?  Let  us  have  our  economic  paradise 
by  all  means,  and  as  speedily  as  possible.  But  when  we 
have  put  the  average  man  through  the  discipline  of  the 
economic  paradise,  what  is  the  result  we  expect  ?  We 
have  not  yet  defined  this  result,  and  the  kind  of  eco- 
nomic paradise  that  is  to  be  should  be  determined  by 
the  result  which  we  want  to  produce.  Nietzsche 
dreamed  of  his  "  overman,"  but  he  was  going  to  pro- 
duce him  by  means  which  are  concrete  negations  of 
the  spirit  which  is  operative  in  the  social  movements 
of  our  days.  The  Nietzschean  overman  is,  in  practice 
if  not  in  theory,  the  apotheosis  of  the  brute  elements 


74  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

of  human  nature,  whereas  it  is  implicit  in  the  modern 
spirit  that  "  the  ape  and  the  tiger "  should  die. 
Nietzsche's  protest  against  all  kinds  of  soft,  morbid 
sentimentalism  is  necessary  and  comes  opportunely. 
Humanitarianism  is  always  in  danger  of  deliquescing 
into  ineffectual  slush.  Nevertheless  the  "  overman  " 
is  as  much  out  of  relation  to  present  reality  as  Jewish 
Apocalyptic  was  remote  from  reality  in  its  day.  But 
Nietzsche,  at  least,  has  endeavored  to  describe  the 
kind  of  result  that  he  would  have  human  effort  pro- 
duce. As  yet  the  modern  social  reformer  has  hardly 
reached  the  pitch  of  his  courage. 

The  rising  tide  of  brotherhood  is  the  death  warrant 
of  materialism.  We  are  without  doubt  moving  with  a 
steady  momentum.  But  whither  ?  Where  do  we  want 
to  get  to  in  the  end  ? 


VIII 
THE  TYRANNY  OF  THINGS 

THE  Voice  which  bade  men  prepare  the  way  of 
the  Lord  was  heard  in  the  wilderness;  and  the 
wilderness  was  the  proper  setting  for  the  Voice. 
It  was  the  Voice  of  Life  uttered  over  against  that 
symbol  of  exhaustion  and  sterility — the  wilderness  of 
Judea.  Of  the  reality  of  the  Voice  in  our  day  there 
can  be  no  question.  It  is  articulate  in  our  advancing 
social  consciousness.  But  of  the  reality  of  the  present 
wilderness  there  can  equally  be  no  question.  The  ex- 
haustion of  certain  tendencies  and  influences  consti- 
tutes as  real  evidence  of  coming  change  as  does  the 
emergence  of  a  new  positive  factor  of  progress.  One 
circumstance  of  this  character  is  the  undoubted  work- 
weariness  which  our  way  of  life  is  producing. 

One  consequence  of  the  materialism  to  which  we 
have  succumbed  (or,  rather,  from  which  we  have  never 
sufficiently  emerged)  is  the  habit  of  thinking  that  man's 
greatness  is  to  be  estimated  in  terms  of  his  inventions 
and  technical  achievements.  That  the  last  century  and 
a  half  has  been  a  period  of  unique  and  unshared  dis- 
tinction in  this  respect  need  not  be  argued;  and  the 
passing  of  time  has  seen  a  great  increase  in  the  rate 
of  the  progressive  triumph  of  human  knowledge  and 
ingenuity  over  physical  forces,  until  it  almost  seems 
as  though  we  had  come  nearly  to  the  end  of  things  in 

75 


76  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

this  particular  region.  Forces  of  nature  that  our  fa- 
thers hardly  knew  of  have  been  harnessed  to  our  com- 
mon uses.  The  earth  has  shrunk  immeasurably  through 
improved  and  accelerated  modes  of  travel.  We  have 
annihilated  distance  by  means  of  the  steam-engine,  the 
turbine,  the  telegraph,  the  telephone,  the  motor-car,  and 
wireless  telegraphy;  and  there  are  still  more  wonder- 
ful and  varied  applications  of  electricity  yet  to  come. 
The  discovery  of  radio-activity  has  revealed  a  form  of 
energy  of  the  possibilities  of  which  we  can  as  yet  form 
no  adequate  conception.  We  are  at  last  beginning  the 
conquest  of  the  air.  Without  peradventure,  this  is  a 
wonderful  story.  Its  witness  to  the  resources  of  the 
human  intellect  and  of  human  ingenuity  is  overwhelm- 
ing; and  the  exceeding  wonder  of  man  has  been  accen- 
tuated by  the  exceeding  wonder  of  his  marvellous 
triumphs.  It  is  no  longer  permissible — in  the  face  of 
the  advance  of  knowledge  and  invention — to  belittle 
man  as  the  microscopic  tenant  of  a  microscopic  wan- 
dering star.  But  the  paradox  of  the  situation  is  sim- 
ply this — that  man  has  only  made  himself  the  slave  of 
the  universe  over  which  he  seemed  to  be  triumphing. 

The  activity  and  the  industry  which  this  advance 
of  invention  and  technical  achievement  has  produced 
is  immense.  The  pace  of  life  has  been  increased  be- 
yond calculation.  Speed  is  the  governing  factor  of  our 
existence.  We  are  for  ever  trying  to  break  records, 
to  discover  how  swiftly  we  can  put  up  buildings,  or 
produce  books,  or  cross  the  ocean.  We  have  become 
the  slaves  of  speed.  We  bolt  through  holes  in  the 
earth  because  we  cannot  travel  quickly  enough  In  the 
daylight.  We  imperil  our  lives  in  order  to  save  a  few 
minutes   in   railway   travelling.    This   were   no  evil 


THE  TYRANNY  OF  THINGS  ^7 

thing  did  it  arise  from  a  more  insistent  sense  of  the 
brevity  of  life  and  the  length  of  art.  But  it  arises  out 
of  no  such  exalted  sense.  We  live  at  a  faster  rate 
simply  because  we  want  to  make  more  money  and  to 
make  it  quickly. 

And  the  consequences?  To  begin  with,  this  fever- 
ish haste  has  all  but  made  the  fine  arts  impossible.  We 
are  not  producing  sculptures  and  architectures  or  pic- 
tures except  on  short  leases.  There  is  little  that  is 
abiding  or  eternal  about  the  creations  of  modern  art. 
We  do  not  possess  the  calm  and  the  rest  in  which  men 
are  able  to  build  for  eternity.  We  produce  no 
"  Faust "  because  we  have  not  the  patience  to  spend 
half  a  century  on  it.  We  produce  no  Amiens  Cathe- 
drals because  we  cannot  afford  to  wait.  Everything 
from  boot  repairing  to  church  building  must  be  done 
"  while  we  wait."  And,  still  worse,  character  is  being 
affected  in  the  same  way.  It  is  unnecessary  to  point 
out  how  the  industrial  organization  which  modern  in- 
ventions have  made  possible  is  affecting  the  physical 
fibre  of  our  people.  The  more  serious  thing  is  that 
men  are  reduced  into  mere  machinery;  and  the  result  is 
an  inevitable  slackening  of  moral  fibre.  We  are  only 
parts  of  the  machine,  cogs  and  cranks  and  what  not; 
and  we  have  ceased  to  inquire  of  our  souls.  Even 
those  who  are  not  directly  involved  in  modern  indus- 
try are  caught  in  its  rush;  and  we  are  developing  into 
a  race  of  highly  strung,  neurasthenic,  irritable  people. 
Whatever  other  circumstances  may  account  for  this, 
it  is  in  great  part  due  to  the  unconscious  subordina- 
tion of  man  to  technical  achievement — which  in  the 
end  means  his  subordination  to  Nature,  which  he  is 
supposed  to  have  put  under  his  feet.     Our  conquests 


78  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

over  Nature,  so  far  from  adding  to  the  content  of  our 
life,  are  only  involving  us  in  a  deeper  servitude  to 
things. 

In  the  river  Conway  there  is  a  pearl-bearing  mussel; 
and  time  was  when  a  respectable  trade  in  pearls  was 
carried  on  in  the  town.  But  the  demands  of  the  Eng- 
lish fish  markets  have  assumed  such  dimensions  that 
the  mussel-fishery  is  carried  on  with  much  greater 
industry  than  formerly.  Men  do  not  gather  pearls 
from  the  Conway  nowadays,  for  they  do  not  allow 
the  mussels  time  to  grow  pearls.  And  the  pace  of 
life  in  our  day  does  not  allow  us  time  to  grow  the 
pearls  of  character  and  culture  which  should  adorn 
our  manhood.  We  are  in  too  great  haste  to  enable  us 
to  cultivate  the  graces  of  character  or  to  improve  the 
furniture  of  our  minds.  After  the  rush  of  the  day's 
work  we  have  neither  energy  nor  disposition  to  occupy 
ourselves  seriously  with  the  business  of  storing  up  in 
our  minds  and  hearts  the  resources  and  materials  of 

/real  happiness.     This  increase  in  the  pace  of  life  has 
/  probably  as  much  to  do  with  the  disintegration   of 

\ family  life  as  any  other  circumstance.     It  is  true  that 
jat  one  end  of  the  social  scale  overcrowding,  drink, 

^the  uncertainty  of  employment,  make  a  secure  and 
jdecent  home  life  impossible.    At  the  other  end  of  the 

i scale,  the  mania  of  pleasure-seeking  has  dissolved  the 

'  common  family  life.  And  in  the  middle  strata,  the 
haste  and  rush  of  life  is  reducing  home  life  to  the  very 
slenderest  dimensions.  A  genuine  home  atmosphere 
takes  time  to  grow;  and  in  practice  nowadays  it  is 
left  to  the  mother.  The  graces  of  candor,  reverence, 
geniality,   and   comradeship — which   are   the   salt   of 

f  family  life — are  not  quickly  produced;  and  they  re- 


THE  TYRANNY  OF  THINGS  79 

quire  far  more  deliberate  and  delicate  handling  and 
far  more  considered  co-operation  than  they  get.  Our 
home  life  is  too  much  a  swift  succession  of  happen- 
ings; it  has  little  coherency,  little  homogeneity.  And 
no  education  in  the  world  can  ever  compensate  for 
the  loss  of  the  discipline  of  home  life,  which  is  the  only 
adequate  foundation  for  the  training  of  the  individual 
for  his  place  and  responsibility  in  the  larger  social 
groupings,  religious  and  political.  The  home  is  the 
proper  school  of  honor,  purity,  and  mutual  obligation; 
it  should  be  the  primary,  and  therefore  the  most  ef- 
fectual moral  gymnasium;  and  the  slackening  of  fam- 
ily ties,  the  dissolution  of  the  home,  is  the  most 
formidable  menace  to  the  stability  of  our  Western 
civilization.  The  home  should  be  a  haven,  a  refuge, 
a  place  of  healing,  the  resting-place  of  body  and  soul, 
a  centre  of  life  and  a  very  heaven  for  the  children — 
instead  of  being  the  mere  dormitory  that,  by  reason 
of  the  pressure  of  our  way  of  life,  it  is  to  most  of  us. 
The  practical  result  of  all  this  is  to  make  us  a  tired, 
exhausted  people.  Our  great  achievements  do  not  con- 
tribute anything  to  the  joy  and  repair  of  life  com- 
mensurate with  the  energy  which  is  being  spent  on 
them.  They  hardly  touch  the  fringe  of  what  is  most 
vital  and  worthy  in  our  manhood.  It  is  true  that  the 
advance  of  medical  science  has  brought  large  and 
inestimable  benefits  to  the  race,  that  the  annihilation 
of  distance  has  promoted  the  intercourse  and  comity 
of  nations,  and  has  contributed  to  the  development  of 
missionary  effort;  but  when  we  have  said  this  much  we 
have  practically  exhausted  the  account  of  the  spiritual 
and  moral  reaction  of  our  scientific  and  technical  tri- 
umphs.    For  the  rest,  all  that  we  have  gained  in  our 


8o  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

conquest  of  nature  is  subordinated  to  purposes  of  per- 
sonal comfort  and  self-aggrandizement.  It  is  scarcely 
necessary  to  point  out  that  this  does  not  make  for  the 
abiding  joy  of  life.  A  man,  in  order  to  be  perma- 
nently happy,  should  have  the  resources  of  happiness 
within  himself,  and  if  not  all  within  himself,  they 
should  at  least  be  very  easily  accessible.  But  our  way 
of  life  does  not  tend  to  the  accumulation  of  inward  re- 
sources of  happiness  and  recreation;  and  we  must  in 
consequence  seek  them  outside  ourselves.  The  elabora- 
tion of  the  means  of  pleasure  in  our  time  is  the  natural 
outcome  of  the  insensate  velocity  at  which  our  lives 
move — which,  to  begin  with,  wears  us  out;  and,  sec- 
ondly, denies  us  the  opportunity  of  storing  up  within 
ourselves  the  means  of  rest  and  repair.  So  we  must 
needs  have  recourse  endlessly  to  the  infinite  variety  of 
pleasurable  satisfaction  which  is  provided  with  so  much 
prodigality  by  the  ingenuity  of  our  time.  Our  very 
weariness  destroys  the  palate  for  the  simpler  joys  of 
domesticity  and  friendship;  and  we  are  satisfied  with 
little  that  is  less  piquant  and  stimulating  than  a  variety 
entertainment.  We  have  become  incapable  of  a  sus- 
tained simplicity  of  life;  and  we  only  redeem  life  from 
staleness  and  flatness  by  frequent  excursions  to  Vanity 
Fair.  So  far  as  the  things  which  make  for  the  joy 
of  life  are  concerned,  we  live  from  hand  to  mouth, 
for  the  conditions  of  the  time  do  not  permit  us  to  lay 
by  a  reserve  of  the  resources  of  happiness.  We  are 
essentially  a  weary,  exhausted  people. 

Nor  can  it  be  held  that  the  advance  that  has  been 
made  in  invention  and  technical  achievement  gives  any 
indication  regarding  the  future  of  the  race.  Certainly 
it  has  been  a  wonderful  revelation  of  the  resources  of 


THE  TYRANNY  OF  THINGS  8i 

human  thought  and  human  skill.  But  what  is  all  this 
advance  to  end  in?  It  would  be  temerity  on  any 
man's  part  to  say  that  this  advance  is  drawing  to  a 
close;  we  know  not  what  unseen  forces  of  nature  may 
yet  be  discovered  and  harnessed  to  our  uses.  But  it 
can  hardly  be  conceived  that  any  future  discovery  of 
this  kind  can  carry  us  any  farther  towards  the  solu- 
tion of  the  problem  of  human  destiny.  It  cannot 
explain  man.  We  have  not  yet  had  from  this  region  a 
single  ray  of  light  upon  the  mystery  of  human  nature. 
We  did,  perhaps,  think  at  one  time  that  our  conquest 
of  nature  would  unravel  "  the  master-knot  of  human 
fate."  As  we  looked  upon  triumph  following  hard 
upon  triumph,  we  cried,  "  Man  is  coming  into  his  own 
at  last.  After  long  centuries  of  child's-play  we  are  at 
last  doing  the  big  real  things  that  have  been  waiting 
so  long.  Yet  a  little  while  and  the  secret  will  be  out !  " 
But  the  secret  is  still  to  seek,  hidden  as  securely  as  it 
was  when  the  writer  of  Job  xxviii.  made  inquiry  con- 
cerning it.  Were  that  ancient  seeker  to  rise  from  the 
dead  and  come  into  this  twentieth  century,  is  it  likely 
that  all  our  achievements,  our  tall  telegraph-poles,  our 
motor-cars,  our  milligrammes  of  radium,  would  an- 
swer his  question?  We  know,  as  no  age  ever  knew, 
how  great  man  is,  how  wonderful,  how  strong,  how 
skilful.  But  what  is  the  result  of  it  all?  Simply  this 
— not  to  solve,  but  to  aggravate  a  thousandfold  the  one 
enormous  problem  that  remains,  the  problem  of  what 
man  himself  is  and  what  he  is  to  be. 

Meantime  we  are  concentrating  our  ingenuity  and 
industry  on  things  that  produce  certain  immediate  sat- 
isfactions, and  we  make  no  real  inquiry  concerning  the 
goal  which  we  want  to  reach  and  which  these  achieve- 


82  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

ments  of  ours  are  supposed  to  help  us  to  reach.  We 
may  evolve  a  paradise  of  subtle  labor-saving  devices, 
ingenious  domestic  utilities,  of  rapid  money-making 
machinery,  and  the  perfection  of  creature  comforts. 
But  is  there  nothing  beyond  that?  We  feel  that  it  is 
no  adequate  issue  for  all  our  endeavor,  and  it  is  per- 
haps due  to  this  that  our  thought  is  being  increasingly 
deflected  towards  and  our  energy  spent  in  pursuit  of 
national  greatness.  But  our  conceptions  of  national 
greatness,  by  reason  of  our  fundamental  materialism, 
rest  upon  the  notion  of  physical  force.  At  least  it  is 
significant  that  almost  the  first  question  that  we  ask 
concerning  a  new  invention  is  whether  it  has  possible 
warlike  use.  We  shall  come,  no  doubt,  upon  a  time 
when  the  aeroplane  will  be  subordinated  to  domestic 
and  commercial  uses;  but  at  the  present  moment  the 
development  of  the  aeroplane  is  being  largely  deter- 
mined by  its  prospective  utility  as  an  instrument  of 
war.  We  are  for  ever  criticising  the  War  Office  and 
the  Admiralty  for  their  tardiness  in  investigating  the 
value  of  some  fresh  invention.  But  signs  are  not 
wanting,  as  we  have  already  seen,  that  there  will  be 
a  diminishing  demand  for  the  elaboration  of  warlike 
instruments.  Not  only — to  quote  Mr,  J,  A.  Hobson — 
is  "  this  atavistic  faith  in  physical  force  the  deadliest 
enemy  of  the  realization  of  that  nobler  purpose  in 
State  and  Church  by  which  the  spirit  of  love  works 
out  human  salvation,"  but  it  is  being  slowly  and  surely 
crushed  out  by  the  rising  feeling  after  brotherhood  and 
international  goodwill.  We  must  reconstruct  our 
ideals  of  national  greatness  accordingly — ideals  in  the 
realization  of  which  the  Dreadnought  and  the  military 
aeroplane  will  be  of  little  account.    Nationality  is  cer- 


THE  TYRANNY  OF  THINGS  83 

tainly  a  necessary  factor  in  human  development,  but 
a  sentiment  of  nationality  which  has  to  be  buttressed 
by  physical  force  makes  not  for  advance  but  for  reac- 
tion and  decay.  There  are  few  menaces  so  formidable 
to  human  progress  in  civilized  countries  as  the  wide 
diffusion  of  a  type  of  Imperialism  which  is  only  an- 
other name  for  a  thoroughgoing  political  materialism. 
There  is  something  pathetic  in  the  simple  faith  of 
many  minds  in  the  efficacy  of  armies  and  navies — as 
though  there  were  no  such  thing  as  history.  The 
secret  of  national  preservation  does  not  lie  in  big 
armaments.    It  must  be  sought  elsewhere. 

Our  modern  way  of  life  is  bankrupt  so  far  as  the 
deeper  needs  and  the  ultimate  problems  of  mankind 
are  concerned.  So  far  we  have  come,  breathlessly; 
and  we  have  arrived  tired  and  exhausted.  Is  it  worth 
while  ?  "  We  have  toiled  all  night  and  have  caught — 
nothing." 


IX 
THE  BLIND  ALLEY  OF  SCIENCE 

SIDE  by  side  with  the  bankruptcy  of  our  modern 
way  of  life  stands  the  virtual  insolvency  of  mod- 
ern ways  of  thought. 
It  has  been  characteristic  of  our  day  that  we  have 
all  with  one  accord  fallen  down  at  the  feet  of  the 
god  of  scientific  method.  It  was  not  unnatural  that 
we  should  do  so.  Its  great  achievements  in  many 
fields  seemed  to  justify  its  claim  to  say  the  last  word 
about  the  whole  of  life.  And  if  we  did  not  altogether 
acquiesce  in  that  claim,  we  did  at  least  concede  that 
science  had  a  right  to  say  a  good  deal.  But  science 
by  its  obedience  to  its  own  methods  has  come  upon  a 
region  where  its  methods  have  proved  inadequate.  It 
has  come  by  steam-train  to  the  ocean's  edge,  and  its 
conveyance  will  carry  it  no  farther.  We  are  looking 
to-day  at  the  significant  phenomenon  of  scientists  of 
the  standing  of  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  and  Sir  William 
Crookes  endeavoring  to  penetrate  that  veil  which  as 
yet  the  long  arm  of  physical  science  is  unable  to 
pierce.  It  is  in  very  many  ways  a  promising  situation. 
Science  has  abandoned  its  early  dogmatism,  and  admits 
that  there  are  more  things  in  heaven  and  earth  than 
were  dreamt  of  in  its  first  philosophy,  and  it  is,  more- 
over, beginning  to  understand  that  its  ordinary  instru- 
ments   are    inappropriate    for    the    exploration    and 

84 


THE  BLIND  ALLEY  OF  SCIENCE        85 

understanding  of  these  things  that  lie  beyond  its  pres- 
ent view. 

The  present  generation  only  knows  by  hearsay  the 
kind  of  exultation  with  which,  after  the  first  astonish- 
ing and  numbing  onset  of  the  new  theory,  the  doctrine 
of  evolution  was  hailed  as  the  interpreter  of  the  uni- 
verse. What  a  splendid  triumph  it  was  of  human 
knowledge  and  patient  inquiry!  How  it  seemed  to 
explain  things !  Here  at  last  was  the  solution  of  the 
first  and  last  problem  of  the  whole  scheme  of  things. 
Evolution — the  blessed  word! 

But  the  application  of  the  clue  did  not  yield  the 
expected  results.  Huxley  tried  to  piece  his  universe 
together  in  the  light  of  evolution  and  ended  in  agnosti- 
cism. Of  these  ultimate  things  he  not  only  said 
that  he  did  not  know,  but  held  it  impossible  to  know. 
But  Huxley  was  a  child  of  the  dawn;  he  was  working 
in  the  twilight.  Surely  half  a  century  must  have  car- 
ried us  beyond  the  point  which  Huxley  arrived  at;  yet 
practically  the  whole  difference  which  fifty  years  have 
made  is  that  hard-shell  agnosticism  is  out  of  fashion. 
The  scientist,  speaking  generally,  still  denies  the  pos- 
session of  knowledge  concerning  the  ultimate  things, 
but  he  no  longer  denies  the  possibility  of  it. 

For  Science  itself  has  revealed  the  fact  that  the 
universe  is  not  the  simple  thing  which  it  had  at  first 
imagined  it  to  be.  It  enunciated  laws  with  a  sublime 
assurance,  and  thought  itself  to  be  on  the  way  to  con- 
structing the  entire  skeleton  of  law  on  which  the  struc- 
ture of  the  whole  universe  rests.  But  it  has  been  learn- 
ing that  to  speak  of  a  law  at  all  is  a  highly  precarious 
thing.  Of  course,  there  is  a  physical  order,  a  rhythm 
and  regularity  of  movement  in  the  universe;  but  so 


86  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

far  as  organic  life  is  concerned  there  is  a  good  deal 
more.  There  seems  to  be  what  is  on  the  face  of  it 
a  certain  arbitrary  capricious  force  at  work  which 
prevents  the  same  causes  always  having  the  same 
effects.  *'  In  the  realm  of  organic  processes,  the  arts 
of  mechanical  calculation  upon  which  science  rests 
continually  fail;  new  species  arise,  new  adaptations, 
new  modes  of  conduct  not  predicable  from  the  minutest 
possible  knowledge  of  antecedents.  It  is  a  world  of 
miracles,  in  the  sense  of  results  which  no  science  can 
enable  us  to  forecast,  and  which  differ  in  quality,  in 
character,  or  in  human  interest  from  anything  that  has 
occurred  before.  When  science  comes  to  deal  with 
life,  the  generalizations  which  it  calls  laws  break  down 
in  consequence.  The  facts  which  science  and  her  meth- 
ods unfold  do  not  furnish  the  full  single  harmony 
which  we  call  the  Universe."  *  That  unknown  quan- 
tity which  eludes  the  methods  of  science  must,  it 
would  seem,  be  discovered — if  it  is  to  be  discovered  at 
all — in  some  other  way. 

And  it  is  the  existence  of  other  modes  of  ascertain- 
ing truth — not  necessarily  alternative,  but  rather  sup- 
plementary— that  science  is  now  compelled  to  recog- 
nize. The  Victorian  scientific  philosophy  tied  itself 
down  to  the  principle  that  nothing  should  be  accepted 
as  true  which  was  not  demonstrated  by  certain 
processes  of  ratiocination  or  by  sensible  observation. 
Reason  and  the  senses — these  are  the  only  sure  guides 
of  man ;  and  things  which  lie  beyond  the  scope  of  these 
guides  are  better  ignored.  At  best  the  existence  of 
things  which  do  not  satisfy  the  demands  of  the  senses 
and  of  reason  Is  hypothetical.     But  plausible  as  the 

*  J.  A.  Hobson,  "  A  Modern  Outlook,"  p.  241. 


THE  BLIND  ALLEY  OF  SCIENCE       87 

principle  seems,  it  nevertheless  is  a  quite  gratuitous 
misreading  of  human  nature.  Man  is  not  made  up 
only  of  reason  and  the  senses;  he  is  strangely  com- 
pounded of  "  loves,  hopes,  longings  ";  and  it  is  entirely 
arbitrary  to  write  off  the  objects  of  these  instincts  as 
unreal  and  illusory.  It  was  a  strangely  unscientific 
proceeding  to  refuse  to  accept  man  as  a  whole,  espe- 
cially as,  to  quote  G.  J.  Romanes,  "  if  the  religious 
instincts  of  humanity  point  out  to  no  reality  as  their 
object,  they  are  out  of  analogy  with  other  instinctive 
endowments.  Elsewhere  in  the  animal  world  there  is 
no  such  thing  as  an  instinct  pointing  aimlessly."  *  It 
was  still  more  unscientific  to  ignore  and  to  deny  the 
validity  of  a  non-rational  human  power,  the  operation 
of  which  is  always  in  some  degree  involved  in  a  com- 
plete scientific  process.  The  acceptance  of  any  hy- 
pothesis or  theory  for  working  purposes  is  essentially 
an  act  of  faith.  Experiment  is  always  the  venture  of 
faith.  You  must  always  trust  a  hypothesis  before  you 
can  prove  it. 

The  truth  seems  to  be  that  reason  is  supreme  where 
causation  is  concerned;  but — as  Romanes  asserts  in 
the  posthumous  "  Thoughts  on  Religion  " — the  organs 
for  the  verifying  of  truth  in  other  domains  must  lie 
elsewhere. t  "  Great  men  of  science,"  says  Mr.  J.  A. 
Hobson  in  the  essay  already  quoted,  "  have  commonly 
been  willing  to  admit  the  limits  of  reason  as  the  guide 
of  life,  and  to  assign  some  real  place  to  faith  and 
imagination  in  the  search  after  understanding."  But 
they  could  hardly  do  otherwise.  A  life  in  time  is  im- 
possible except  on  a  basis  of  faith.  Every  step  one 
takes  is  a  step  into  the  dark.    Every  enterprise  under- 

•  "  Thoughts  on  Religion,"  p.  82.  f  Ibid.,  p.  112. 


88  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

taken,  every  project  conceived,  is  essentially  an  opera- 
tion of  faith.  Men  face  to  face  with  an  inscrutable 
to-morrow  must  take  risks.  A  thoroughgoing  rational- 
ism means  stagnation.  And  it  certainly  seems  irra- 
tional to  suppose  that  the  process  of  faith  which  serves 
us  so  well  in  the  ordinary  matters  of  life  is  going  to 
break  down  utterly  in  the  graver  and  more  ultimate 
concerns  of  the  mind. 

Up  to  this  point,  then,  science  has  failed  to  yield  the 
clue  to  human  existence;  and  it  seems  disposed  to 
admit  that  it  is  not  likely  to  do  so.  It  is  hardly  too 
much  to  say  that  science  is  passing  through  a  phase 
of  scepticism  of  its  own  methods,  "  scepticism  of  the 
instrument,"  as  H.  G.  Wells  calls  it;  and  it  has  arrived 
at  this  point  by  turning  its  own  methods  upon  itself. 
It  no  longer  dreams  of  supposing  that  it  is  even  on  the 
way  to  saying  the  last  word  upon  the  sum  of  things. 
It  has  discovered  its  own  limitations;  and  it  leaves  the 
regions  that  lie  beyond  its  own  kingdom  to  modes  of 
exploration  other  than  its  own. 

But  this  is  not  a  case  of  having  toiled  all  night  and 
caught  nothing.  The  increase  of  our  knowledge  of 
the  physical  universe  is  enormous;  and  though  we  can 
hardly  hold  that  this  has  added  materially  to  our 
understanding  of  the  ultimate  problems  of  life,  it  has 
materially  added  to  the  stature  of  man.  It  lies  behind 
all  our  great  technical  achievements;  and  it  is  not  the 
fault  of  science  that  these  great  triumphs  are  not 
making  adequate  contribution  to  the  moral  and  spirit- 
ual advance  of  the  race.  Science  has  undoubtedly 
strengthened  the  belief  in  the  reality  of  human  destiny. 
We  believe  that  the  creation  means  something  and 
means  it  intensely,  and  that  this  meaning  somehow  cul- 


THE  BLIND  ALLEY  OF  SCIENCE        89 

minates  in  man.  But  what  this  destiny  is  science 
leaves  us  to  speculate.  It  realizes  that  it  has  not  to 
do  with  origins  and  ends,  but  with  processes  of  which 
it  cannot  see  either  the  beginning  or  the  ultimate  goal. 
This  is  not  the  only  thing  we  owe  to  science.  The 
patience  and  the  rigor  of  the  scientific  discipline  has 
invaded  other  departments  of  knowledge;  and  our 
serious  thinking  is  moving  on  a  plane  of  greater  thor- 
oughness than  ever  before.  We  have  become  impatient 
of  the  maker  of  brisk  generalizations.  We  demand 
that  there  shall  be  in  history  a  rigorous  scrutiny  and 
criticism  of  the  resources,  so  that  our  data  may  be 
sound.  In  religion  it  has  led  to  a  sustained  and  severe 
examination  of  documents,  to  a  careful  study  of  re- 
ligious history  and  experience.  There  is  no  field  of 
human  knowledge  which  has  not  been  invaded  by  the 
scientific  spirit.  And  if  evidence  were  needed  of  the 
completeness  with  which  the  scientific  spirit  has  laid 
hold  of  the  modern  religious  mind,  it  is  to  be  found  in 
the  thoroughly  scientific  basis  of  the  operations  of  the 
Edinburgh  Missionary  Conference  of  1910.  Even 
Christian  propagandism  in  heathendom  has  assumed 
the  aspect  of  a  science.  The  patient  and  painful  ac- 
cumulation of  data,  their  thorough  classification,  and 
a  perfectly  fearless  deduction  from  them — this  is  the 
contribution  of  the  scientific  spirit  to  all  branches  of 
knowledge;  and  its  value  is  not  to  be  weighed. 


X 


THE  INSOLVENCY  OF  ORGANIZED 
RELIGION 

IF  the  Church  has  fallen  on  evil  days,  it  is  not  be- 
cause she  has  lacked  candid  critics.  Friend  and 
foe  have  dealt  with  her  with  much  faithfulness. 
The  friend  has  prescribed  for  her  frailties  with  inex- 
haustible ingenuity,  though  it  can  hardly  be  said  that  his 
diagnosis  of  her  trouble  has  always  been  convincing. 
The  foe  has  bidden  her  wind  up  her  affairs  and  retreat 
ignobly  to  the  crowded  scrap-heap  of  obsolete  causes. 

But  the  Church  still  goes  on — the  despair  and  the 
wonder  of  friend  and  foe.  Her  appearance  is  not  that 
of  great  prosperity;  indeed,  it  must  be  confessed  that 
outwardly  she  makes  but  an  indifferent  show.  But  the 
amazing  fact  is  that  with  all  her  defects  and  frailties 
she  continues  to  exist.  She  ought — judging  from  what 
her  critics  have  said  of  her — to  have  disappeared  this 
many  a  day  into  the  memories  of  men.  But  she  is  still 
here;  still  on  the  field. 

It  certainly  does  not  appear  that  she  takes  kindly 
to  the  nostrums  of  her  physicians;  indeed,  they  do  not 
seem  to  have  been  sufficiently  efficacious  in  occasional 
application  to  justify  much  confidence  in  their  per- 
manent value.  May  the  truth  not  be  that  the  Church 
does  not  realize  yet  that  she  is  sick,  and  that  in  conse- 
quence she  can  hardly  be  expected  to  pay  much  heed 
to  those  who  would  physic  her  ? 

90 


THE  INSOLVENCY  OF  RELIGION       91 

But  that  the  Church  is  in  a  bad  way  is  not  open  to 
question;  and  perhaps  the  clearest  evidence  of  the 
disorder  which  has  laid  hold  of  her  is  the  kind  of  test 
of  her  own  efficiency  which  she,  in  common  with  her 
critics,  applies.  It  is  characteristic  of  the  time — and 
this  is  simply  a  phase  of  that  commercializing  tendency 
which  obtains  in  other  regions  also — that  practically 
the  only  test  of  the  efficiency  of  the  Church  that  we 
are  capable  of  appreciating  is  that  of  statistical  returns. 
Fat  statistics  imply  the  prosperous  Church.  Lean 
statistics  mean  a  failing  Church.  It  was  this  test  that 
they  applied  in  Laodicea. 

It  is  hardly  to  be  doubted  that  the  modern  habit  of 
occasionally  enumerating  the  people  who  go  to  church 
has  fastened  this  utterly  fallacious  and  injurious  no- 
tion very  strongly  on  the  Church  in  our  day;  and  in 
consequence  it  has  led  men  to  think  that  the  things 
the  Church  should  aim  at  are  big  crowds  and  big  col- 
lections. So  we  have  been  for  more  than  a  decade 
asking,  "  How  shall  we  get  the  people  to  come  to 
church?  "  as  though  that  were  the  end  of  the  Church. 
No  doubt  it  is  a  good  thing  to  bring  in  crowds  and  to 
collect  piles  of  money;  but  these  things  are  not  to  be 
had  for  long  (though  they  may  be  had  for  a  short 
time)  unless  they  come  as  by-products.  This  is  not 
the  primary  problem  of  the  Church.  That  lies  else- 
where; and  when  that  is  solved,  the  problem  of  filling 
the  pews  and  the  offertory  bag  can  be  left  to  solve 
itself. 

In  the  days  in  which  these  pages  are  being  written 
there  is  a  very  interesting  instance  of  the  way  in  which 
this  servitude  to  statistics  may  warp  judgment.  The 
19 10  statistics  of  the  churches  have  lately  been  pub- 


92  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

lished,  and  reveal  a  very  considerable  decline  in  mem- 
bership and  in  some  other  directions.  There  is  a  good 
deal  of  concern  expressed  with  regard  to  this  diminu- 
tion, and  writers  in  the  public  Press  are  at  great  pains 
to  discover  the  reason  for  it.  But  as  yet  not  one  of 
them  seems  to  have  considered  the  question  whether 
this  diminution  of  membership  may  not,  after  all,  be 
on  the  whole  a  sign  of  progress.  The  decrease  is  re- 
garded without  question  as  being  an  unmitigated  evil. 
But  it  is  conceivable  that  a  decrease  in  membership 
may  be  an  unmixed  good.  There  is  always  in  every 
congregation  a  large  margin  of  people  who  are  mere 
passengers,  whose  names  are  on  the  roll  of  communi- 
cants, but  who  make  not  the  slenderest  contribution  to 
the  total  vitality  and  energy  of  the  congregation;  and 
generally  not  only  does  it  not  matter  a  straw  that  these 
people  should  drop  out  of  formal  connection  with  the 
church,  but  it  is  a  positive  gain.  They  cumber  the 
ground.  It  is  questionable  whether  the  effective  core 
of  the  average  congregation  amounts  to  more  than  a 
third  of  its  total  membership;  and  there  is  therefore  a 
very  considerable  margin  within  which  the  decrease 
of  church  membership  can  proceed  without  even  ap- 
preciable diminution  of  the  working  power  of  the  con- 
gregation. 

The  serious  element  in  the  diminishing  membership 
of  the  Free  Churches  is  that  even  natural  and  inevitable 
decrease  through  death  and  migration  is  not  com- 
pensated for  by  a  steady  accession  of  young  men  and 
women  into  church  fellowship;  and  in  order  to  dis- 
cover the  real  cause  of  the  ineffectualness  of  the  mod- 
ern church  we  should  undertake  a  close  scrutiny  of  the 
circumstances  in  which  this  particular  state  of  things 


THE  INSOLVENCY  OF  RELIGION       93 

originates.  But  one  thing  may  be  asserted  with  some 
certainty — that  the  present  condition  of  the  Church 
does  not  originate  in  a  single  cause  or  in  a  single  class 
of  causes.  The  complexity  of  the  symptoms  indicates 
a  complex  of  troubles;  though  it  should  not  be  over- 
looked that  many  of  the  troubles,  and  the  aggravation 
of  the  rest,  may  have  at  last  to  be  traced  to  a  single 
tendency. 

There  has  hardly  been  a  period  when  the  Church 
was  less  sure  of  herself  than  she  is  to-day.  She  has 
not  yet  been  able  to  lay  the  ghosts  of  evolution  and 
criticism;  and  though  she  is  persuaded  that  they  are 
no  more  than  ghosts  so  far  as  she  is  concerned,  they 
still  trouble  her  not  a  little.  She  is  still  timid  and 
apologetic,  and  is  anxious  to  justify  her  existence. 
She  whittles  down  her  demands  to  the  very  lowest 
dimensions;  and  when  she  would  speak  like  thunder 
she  lisps  and  stutters.  She  can  hardly  ask  her  constit- 
uents to  support  her  without  prefacing  her  request 
with  an  apology;  and  her  people  have  taken  advan- 
tage of  her  timidity  to  grumble  about  "  these  incessant 
appeals  for  money."  There  are  some  things  that  the 
Church  should  take  for  granted,  and  has  no  right  to 
take  in  any  other  way.  Her  members'  duty  to  furnish 
her  with  the  necessary  cash  resources  for  the  upkeep 
of  her  machinery  is  one  of  these  things;  and  in  coming 
cap  in  hand  and  timidly  to  beg  this,  when  it  should  be 
asked  for  as  her  right,  she  is  practically  surrendering 
her  right  to  make  authoritative  demands  upon  her 
members  all  along  the  line. 

The  Church  is  timid  because  she  is  afraid  she  may 
scare  people  away  and  show  a  statistical  slump  at  the 
end  of  the  year.    She  is  obsessed  by  the  entirely  inex- 


94  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

cusable  fallacy  that  collections  keep  people  away  from 
church.  Collections  never  keep  people  away  from 
church.  It  is  true  that  in  poor  districts  a  large  build- 
ing debt  will  frighten  people  and  prevent  their  asso- 
ciating themselves  with  a  church;  but  this  is  so  fre- 
quently not  the  case  that  it  can  hardly  be  adduced  in 
explanation  of  the  failure  of  many  churches  even  in 
poor  districts.  But  to  suppose  that  people  are  scared 
away  by  collections  is  a  very  grave  misconception.  It 
is  entirely  a  question  of  how  the  matter  is  regarded. 
If  the  church  through  its  office-bearers  comes  in  a 
spirit  of  timidity  to  try  to  wheedle  money  out  of  the 
congregation,  with  profuse  apologies,  then  it  is  court- 
ing failure.  When  the  sufficient  and  worthy  support 
of  the  church  and  its  enterprises  is  declared  roundly 
and  uncompromisingly  to  be  a  Christian  obligation, 
that  it  involves  the  honor  of  Christ,  the  money  is  forth- 
coming.   Fear  is  the  enemy. 

This  matter  of  collections  is  referred  to  as  an  in- 
stance of  the  kind  of  failure  which  follows  timidity. 
But  the  trouble  spreads  into  more  vital  regions.  It  is 
perhaps  inevitable  that  the  rationalistic  activity  of  re- 
cent years  should  call  out  the  apologetic  note;  but  it 
has  been  overdone.  Even  for  the  over-emphasis  upon 
the  apologetic  side  of  things  there  is,  of  course,  some 
excuse.  We  had  hardly  recovered  from  the  panic 
which  Darwin's  publication  of  the  evolution  theory 
precipitated,  when  we  found  ourselves  in  the  full  blast 
of  the  storm  of  biblical  criticism.  And  while  we  were 
still  in  the  midst  of  the  endeavor  to  recover  our 
equilibrium,  the  rationalist  press  flooded  the  country 
with  its  characteristic  literature.  We  were  naturally 
compelled  to  take  up  the  defensive.    But  we  took  it  up 


THE  INSOLVENCY  OF  RELIGION       95 

without  sufficiently  realizing  the  limits  within  which 
reasoned  apologetic  is  effective.  The  authority  of  re- 
vealed religion  over  against  rationalistic  hypotheses, 
the  authority  of  Scripture  over  against  critical  theories 
— neither  of  these  things  is  to  be  finally  established  by 
mere  process  of  ratiocination;  and  so  far  as  the  average 
man  is  concerned  there  is  no  effective  test  but  the 
pragmatic.  The  proper  answer  to  sceptical  and  ration- 
alistic onslaughts  is  not  defence  but  defiance;  increased 
aggressiveness,  more  unremitting  propagandism — it  is 
along  these  lines  alone  that  Christianity  can  justify 
itself  finally  to  the  world. 

It  must,  of  course,  be  recognized  that  the  coming  of 
evolution  and  criticism  (when  once  it  was  seen  that 
they  had  come  to  stay)  necessitated  a  good  deal  of 
readjustment  of  traditional  schemes  of  belief.  They 
naturally  produced  a  considerable  amount  of  anxiety, 
and  the  anxiety  led  to  a  certain  amount  of  slackness 
pending  the  achievement  of  some  measure  of  certainty. 
But  it  can  hardly  be  supposed — whatever  the  conse- 
quences may  have  been  to  the  form  of  doctrine — that 
genuine  Christian  experience  was  deeply  agitated. 
And  effective  propaganda  depends  far  more  upon  a 
sound  experience  than  it  does  upon  a  definite,  clear-cut 
construction  of  belief.  The  Church  possessed  amid  all 
the  tumult  a  kingdom  which  could  not  be  moved;  only 
she  forgot  it  overmuch.  It  would  have  been  her  wis- 
dom and  her  salvation  had  she  seen  properly  the  lie 
of  the  land,  and  announced  boldly  to  the  world  that, 
her  foundations  being  established  on  the  "  Rock " 
which  is  Christ  Jesus,  she  intended  faithfully  to  con- 
tinue the  work  whereunto  she  is  called. 

It  is  easy  to  be  wise  after  the  event;  and  the  present 


96  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

generation  can  hardly  appreciate  the  acute,  intense 
anxiety  which  followed  upon  the  apparent  menace  of 
the  new  scientific  and  critical  tendencies  of  half  a  cen- 
tury ago.  But  the  panic  of  the  time  entailed  the  losing 
of  much  ground;  and  when  the  note  of  authority  is 
once  dropped  it  is  not  easy  to  pick  it  up  again.  It  has, 
indeed,  not  been  recovered  to  this  day,  though  there 
are  some  signs  that  it  will  be  regained  before  long. 
But  when  it  is  recovered  it  will  be  found  to  be  the 
authority  not  of  intellectual  certitude,  but  of  an  assured 
Christian  experience.  The  propagandist  will  go  forth 
not  with  ex  cathedra  propositions,  but  with  the  simple 
statement,  "  One  thing  I  know,  that,  whereas  I  was 
blind,  now  I  see."  And  that  ''  one  thing  "  is  an  in- 
alienable, unalterable  possession  which  neither  scien- 
tific nor  critical  theories  can  destroy. 

Perhaps  the  day  will  come  when  we  shall  regard  the 
challenge  which  faith  received  to  have  been,  not  a 
device  of  Satan,  but  a  providential  arrangement  for 
clearing  the  air.  For  there  can  be  no  manner  of  doubt 
that  the  Gospel  appeal  was  based  frequently  upon  in- 
adequate, not  to  say  fallacious  premises.  I  heard  on 
one  occasion  a  pious  minister  declare  that  he  knew  a 
young  man  who  had  gone  wrong  because  a  certain 
Old  Testament  scholar  of  reputation  had  said  that 
there  were  two  Isaiahs.  But  the  responsibility  of  this 
calamity  lay,  not  at  the  door  of  the  critic,  but  of  a 
system  of  doctrine  which  made  the  Christian  life  con- 
tingent upon  the  question  of  the  number  of  Isaiahs. 
Whether  there  be  two  or  twenty  or  two  hundred 
Isaiahs,  it  is  a  matter  which  should  not  affect  a  man's 
relation  to  Christ.  But  it  shows  the  extent  of  the 
bibliolatry  which  has  for  a  long  time  stood  for  Chris- 


THE  INSOLVENCY  OF  RELIGION       97 

tianity  that  a  statement  of  this  kind  should  be  made  at 
all.  Christianity  does  not  depend  upon  a  theory  of 
inspiration;  and  the  fact  that  it  has  been  so  persistently 
represented  as  doing  so  has  been  a  source  of  incalcula- 
ble weakness  to  the  Church  for  many  days. 

This  has  given  some  ground  for  the  feeling  that  the 
Church  has  lacked  candor  in  her  attitude  to  scientific 
and  critical  problems.  This  feeling  is  only  very  par- 
tially justified;  and  the  seeming  lack  of  candor  may 
very  largely  be  explained  by  the  instinctive  human 
tendency  to  old  fogyism — a  tendency  which  is  char- 
acteristic of  scientists  as  well  as  of  theologians.  It  has 
also  to  be  said  that  caution  is  not  of  necessity  lack  of 
candor.  We  are  beginning  to  see  that  our  unquestion- 
ing devotion  to  the  evolution  hypothesis  has  involved 
us  in  many  untenable  positions;  and  we  no  longer 
propound  evolution  as  the  clue  to  every  mystery  with 
the  same  cheerful  ease  as  we  did  twenty  years  ago. 
Those  whose  faith  in  evolution  was  from  the  beginning 
to  some  extent  qualified  are  being  justified  by  the  pres- 
ent tendencies  of  thought.  At  the  same  time  it  is  not 
likely  that  the  ordinary  outsider  will  make  these  quali- 
fications. All  he  knows  is,  that  Evolution  is  here  and 
Criticism  is  here;  and  they  are  here  for  good.  He 
does  not  see  their  inevitable  limitations;  but  he  knows 
that  they  have  made  some  difference.  And  he  notices, 
or  thinks  that  he  notices,  that  the  Church  is  not  facing 
up  to  them  frankly,  and  that  it  is  trying  to  hedge. 
He  says  that  the  Church  is  going  on  as  though  nothing 
had  happened;  and  that  it  is  condemned  by  its  own 
default. 

Now  this  is  simply  not  true  of  the  Church  at  the 
present  time,  though  it  may  be  true  that  the  Church 


98  THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

has  not  yet  co-ordinated  the  new  knowledge  fully  with 
her  way  of  life.  One  is  tempted  to  think  that  a  good 
deal  of  the  criticism  which  is  of  this  character  arises 
out  of  wilful  ignorance  of  the  facts,  and  is  intended 
deliberately  to  discredit  the^  Church.  Any  stick  is 
good  enough  to  beat  a  dog  with,  even  though  you  do 
not  know  what  the  stick  is  made  of.  But  there  is 
always  a  danger,  if  you  do  not  examine  the  stick  be- 
forehand, that  it  may  break  in  your  hands  and  make 
you  look  foolish.  There  is  not  a  little  criticism  of  the 
Church  at  the  present  time  which  is  simply  silly,  and 
will  sooner  or  later  befool  the  critic.  There  is  within 
the  Church  also  at  the  present  some  demand  that  the 
preacher  should  take  the  people  more  frankly  into  his 
confidence  regarding  the  modifications  of  belief  that 
the  results  of  scientific  and  critical  scholarship  neces- 
sitate. But  I  am  persuaded  that  the  demand  is  a 
fallacious  one.  After  all,  what  science  and  criticism 
have  to  tell  us,  and  their  relation  to  our  schemes  of 
belief,  belong  to  the  hinterland  of  faith;  and  what  is 
wanted  is,  not  frank  expositions  of  the  difference  they 
make,  but  a  frank  (even  though  it  be  tacit)  assump- 
tion of  those  results  of  scientific  and  critical  work 
which  seem  to  be  well  founded,  and  then  to  allow  these 
to  work  out  naturally  their  own  consequences  in  the 
preaching  and  teaching.  Very  little  good  is  likely  to 
accrue  from  stated  endeavors  to  explicate  the  results 
of  modern  scholarship  to  an  ordinary  mixed  congre- 
gation. This  is  a  case  for  a  policy  of  indirect  and 
peaceful  penetration.  It  would  require  a  far  higher 
level  of  general  education  than  that  which  prevails  to 
enable  the  preacher  to  pursue  a  direct  policy  of  edu- 
cating his  people  into  a  genuine  understanding  of  the 


THE  INSOLVENCY  OF  RELIGION       99 

problems  which  science  and  criticism  have  raised  and 
the  difference  that  they  have  made. 

But  I  am  persuaded  that  it  is  possible  to  over- 
estimate greatly  the  influence  of  this  particular  factor 
in  a  diagnosis  of  the  present  state  of  the  Church,  and 
that  we  must  look  for  the  more  direct  and  effective 
reasons  of  her  present  impotency  in  other  directions. 
And  if,  greatly  daring,  one  may  venture  on  a  large 
generalization,  our  trouble  is  largely  due  to  the  fact 
that  the  people  in  the  churches  are  religious  without ' 
being  distinctively  Christian.  Religion  may  be  no 
more  than  a  culture;  Christianity  is  supremely  an 
obedience,  a  witness,  a  service. 

This  is  a  thesis  which  requires  a  good  deal  of  quali- 
fication, but  I  think  it  holds  good  as  a  broad  state- 
ment of  the  case  in  the  face  of  the  modern  situation. 
For  multitudes  of  church-folk  Christianity  seems  to 
consist  in  the  main  in  church  attendance  and  the  inci- 
dental observances  which  gather  around  it.  It  is  a 
good  thing  to  attend  the  public  worship  of  the  Church, 
and  it  counts  for  not  a  little  in  the  preservation  of 
the  tone  of  our  general  life  that  multitudes  feel  that 
church  attendance  is  a  real  obligation.  But  when  that 
represents  the  sum-total  of  one's  Christian  profession, 
it  is  clear  that  there  is  a  great  deal  of  Christianity 
left  out.  The  consequence  is  that,  saving  only  for 
the  sense  of  duty  done,  our  worship  leaves  us  where  it 
found  us. 

It  is  easy  to  blame  the  minister  for  this;  and  there 
is  no  doubt  that  some  responsibility  for  it  rests  upon 
him.  The  explanation,  however,  is  to  be  found  for 
the  greater  part  in  the  prevailing  idea  that  our  religion 
is  simply  a  department  of  our  life  which,  like  other 


lOO        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

departments,  requires  to  be  cultivated,  and  may  be 
expected  to  provide  us  with  a  certain  measure  of 
emotional,  aesthetic,  and  intellectual  satisfaction,  but 
which  need  exercise  no  very  profound  ethical  discipline 
upon  us.  We  go  to  worship  for  certain  benefits  which 
we  expect,  rather  than  for  our  equipment  for  the  real 
business  of  Christianity.  Our  Christianity  ends  in 
church,  whereas  a  true  Christianity  only  begins  there. 
The  old  phrase,  "  the  means  of  grace,"  indicates  the 
real  character  of  the  gatherings  of  the  Church.  We 
meet  in  fellowship  that  we  may  obtain  grace;  but  it 
belongs  to  the  very  nature  of  grace  that  it  should  be 
passed  on.  There  is  no  impression,  says  the  modern 
psychologist,  without  expression;  and  the  end  of  man- 
hood is  moral  action.  The  business  of  our  religious 
observances  is  to  produce  upon  us  those  impressions 
which  will  work  out  in  moral  action  on  the  Christian 
plane;  and  unless  the  impressions  which  we  receive  are 
expressed  in  this  way,  they  will  express  themselves 
within  us  in  ways  that  hurt  and  harm  us.  To  dam  up 
the  grace  of  God  in  our  own  souls  is  to  turn  it  into 
poison.  Even  grace  can  only  be  kept  sweet  and  whole- 
some by  being  kept  in  motion.  The  Dead  Sea  is  a 
dead  sea  simply  because  it  has  no  outlet;  and  there  is 
much  "  dead  sea  "  in  the  Church  to-day  because  its 
outlets  are  too  few  and  too  narrow. 

Judaism  had  two  co-ordinate  points — God  and  Man. 
These  were  the  two  foci  of  the  curve.  Christianity 
has  three — God,  Man,  and  the  Other  Man.  The  dis- 
tinction of  Christianity  is  that  it  puts  man  in  his  own 
place,  between  God  and  his  neighbor;  and  teaches  him 
that  he  may  receive  grace  from  the  One,  which  he 
may  and  must  transmute  into  energy  for  the  service 


THE  INSOLVENCY  OF  RELIGION      loi 

of  the  other.  The  problem  of  man — the  individual 
and  the  community — is  so  to  organize  his  Hfe  that  the 
grace  of  God  may  find  easy  way-leave  through  him 
to  the  world  beyond.  Otherwise  his  religious  exercises 
only  produce  surfeit  and  impotency.  The  Hebrew 
prophets  frequently  inveighed  against  a  religion  which 
exercised  no  moral  discipline  on  those  who  professed 
it;  for  such  a  religion,  being  no  more  than  a  selfish  and 
exclusive  culture,  has  in  it  the  seeds  of  corruption. 
Religion  for  its  own  sake,  or  religion  merely  for  the 
sake  of  oneself,  cannot  escape  distemper  and  dissolu- 
tion. It  is  so  with  every  human  interest.  The  quest 
of  truth  for  truth's  sake — a  purely  academic  philos- 
ophy— tends  to  end  in  the  sterility  of  scepticism.  Art 
for  art's  sake  means  inevitably  a  debased  art.  Reli- 
gion, most  of  all,  must  suffer  by  an  isolated  culture. 
It  must  have  wide-open  outlets;  and  constant  care 
should  be  taken  to  secure  that  the  outlets  are  as  free 
and  unencumbered  as  the  inlets  are.  The  prosperity 
of  a  Christian  community  depends  not  less  upon  the 
enterprises  in  which  it  engages  than  upon  the  efficiency 
of  its  ministry  or  the  frequency  of  its  means  of  grace. 
Indeed,  it  may  be  that  the  very  multiplicity  of  our 
meetings  in  these  days  may  be  at  once  a  cause  and  a 
symptom  of  this  trouble.  We  concentrate  our  energies 
upon  securing  big  meetings,  and  are  satisfied  when  we 
get  them.  We  are  not  equally  concerned  (as  we 
should  be)  that  the  meetings  should  have  definite  prac- 
tical consequences.  We  are  usually  much  exercised 
about  our  finances,  and  It  is  commonly  the  case  that 
the  income  does  not  cover  the  expenditure.  It  is  not 
recognized  that  it  is  a  somewhat  more  serious  matter 
that  our  spiritual  income  greatly  exceeds  our  spiritual 


I02         THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

expenditure,  and  the  connection  between  the  financial 
deficiencies  and  our  spiritual  surpluses  is  fairly  close. 
May  it  not  be  that  the  Church  is  infirm  and  ineffectual 
to-day  because  its  machinery  is  clogged  by  a  glut  of 
unutilized  grace? 

We  may,  I  think,  find  corroboration  of  this  view  in 
more  than  one  direction.  The  narrowness  of  outlook 
in  the  average  congregation,  the  inability  to  realize  the 
wider  demands  of  God's  Kingdom,  the  sheer  incapacity 
of  the  majority  of  evangelical  Christians  to  think  im- 
perially in  regard  to  the  obligation  of  the  Church,  arise 
out  of  this  defective  view  of  Christianity.  It  is  no 
exaggeration  to  say  that,  speaking  generally,  the  Edin- 
burgh Conference  has  hardly  yet  made  an  appreciable 
difference  to  English  Christendom  at  large.  The  mis- 
sionary enterprise  is  regarded  as  being  a  secondary 
obligation  and  not  as  involved  in  the  very  substance  of 
the  Gospel.  It  is  supposed  to  be  something  which  the 
Church  can  take  up  at  leisure;  and  no  feeling  of  its 
urgency  generally  exists.  The  emphasis  seems  rather 
to  be  on  making  one's  own  particular  church  organiza- 
tion a  good,  prosperous  going  concern.  The  wealth 
and  respectability  of  a  congregation  are  conceived  to 
be  its  main  assets;  and  attendance  at  church  is  fre- 
quently no  more  than  observing  the  requirements  of 
good  form.  The  entire  scale  of  values  seems  to  be 
wrong;  that  is  to  say,  the  Church  has  adopted  the  scale 
of  values  which  prevails  outside  and  carries  itself  ac- 
cordingly. A  great  deal  of  energy  is  spent  in  the  culti- 
vation of  social  and  recreative  interests  which  bear  no 
conceivable  sort  of  relation  to  the  main  business  of  the 
Church. 

It  is  due  to  this  temper  that  the  recognition  by  the 


THE  INSOLVENCY  OF  RELIGION      103 

Church  of  its  responsibihty  in  the  matter  of  social 
readjustments  has  been  so  tardy.  It  has  been  in  a 
sense  a  just  complaint  that  the  Church  has  been  exces- 
sively other-worldly;  but  it  has  been  with  a  wrong 
kind  of  other-worldliness.  There  is  a  sane  other- 
worldliness  which  is  inseparable  from  a  belief  in  im- 
mortality; but  that  manner  of  other-worldliness  prop- 
erly conceived  has  a  very  intimate  bearing  upon  a 
man's  present  life.  To  be  other-worldly  in  a  genuine 
way  is,  if  not  to  have  contempt  for,  at  least  to  appreci- 
ate at  its  proper  value  the  kind  of  hope  that  the  world 
sets  its  soul  upon.  A  wholesome  other-worldliness 
knows,  for  instance,  how  much  riches  and  social  posi- 
tion and  the  like  are  worth.  But  the  kind  of  other- 
worldliness  which  has  been  current  could  exist  side  by 
side  with  the  most  flagrant  and  unashamed  worldliness. 
And  there  is  no  sterility  more  appalling  than  that  of 
a  worldly  Church.  It  is  this  vapid,  sentimental  other- 
worldliness,  superimposed  upon  inner  worldliness, 
which  has  made  the  Church  blind  to  the  nature  of  the 
need  round  about  it.  It  certainly  has  distributed  alms 
with  a  more  or  less  free  hand;  and  it  has  run  a  mission 
in  some  adjacent  poor  district.  But  there  has  been 
little  apparent  appreciation  of  the  nature  or  dimensions 
of  the  actual  problem  which  the  existence  of  the  slum 
area  implies;  nor  has  it  seen  the  logic  which  demands 
that,  since  it  conceives  it  to  be  a  part  of  its  duty  to 
relieve  poverty,  it  is  also  part  of  its  duty  to  set  about 
removing  the  removable  causes  of  poverty.  It  has 
rather  gone  on  in  an  unchangingly  slipshod  and  casual 
way;  and  frequently  by  the  undiscriminating  char- 
acter of  its  almsgiving  has  aggravated  the  problem 
which  it  was  seeking  to  relieve.     It  is  true  it  is  no 


I04        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

longer  possible  to  accuse  the  Church  of  ignoring  the 
social  problem;  it  is,  however,  still  not  unjust  to  say 
that,  apart  from  a  few  organizations  associated  with 
the  churches,  it  shows  few  signs  of  really  understand- 
ing the  problem  of  poverty  and  its  own  relation  to  it. 
The  Church  has  not  in  our  day  thought  out  or 
formulated  a  policy  for  meeting  the  need  of  the  mod- 
ern world.  The  casual  and  perfunctory  way  in  which 
it  approaches  the  social  problem  (which  is  far  more 
intimately  connected  with  the  advance  of  the  King- 
dom of  God  than  is  generally  acknowledged)  is  pretty 
characteristic  of  its  attitude  to  most  of  the  matters 
that  are  agitating  the  minds  of  people  who  think.  The 
question  of  church  extension  is  another  example  of  the 
slack,  slipshod  way  in  which  the  modern  Church 
works;  and  in  many  directions  there  is  a  great  deal  of 
overlapping  and  consequent  waste  of  energy.  All  this 
contributes  to  give  the  Church  an  appearance  of  ex- 
haustion and  futility  which  handicaps  it  incalculably 
on  every  side.  It  is  easy  to  extenuate  the  failure  of 
the  Church  by  speaking  of  the  prevailing  unbelief.  But 
unbelief  is  never  an  excuse  for  the  Church's  weak- 
ness; it  is  a  challenge  to  its  energy.  The  only  unbelief 
that  really  matters  is  that  which  arises  out  of  the 
persuasion  that  Christianity  does  not  matter;  and  if  it 
does  not  matter,  it  is  simply  because  those  who  profess 
it  do  not  make  it  matter. 


XI 

THE  HARVEST  OF  BAD  HUSBANDRY 

WE  have  laid  the  larger  share  of  the  responsi- 
bility for  the  existing  state  of  affairs  in  the 
Church  at  the  door  of  an  inadequate  recog- 
nition of  the  meaning  of  Christianity,  which  has  pro- 
duced an  isolated  and  selfish  religious  culture  and  a 
narrow  and  false  outlook  upon  the  world.  The  great- 
est element  in  the  tragedy  of  the  situation  is  that  we 
fail  to  commend  Christianity  even  to  the  young  people 
brought  up  within  the  circle  of  presumably  Christian 
influence.  It  is  little  to  be  wondered  at,  that  the  Church 
hardly  wins  a  recruit  from  among  the  young  men  and 
women  outside  its  borders  when  it  can  hardly  keep 
those  that  are  within. 

No  one  can  contemplate  the  youth  of  the  Church 
to-day  with  any  degree  of  understanding  without  seri- 
ous misgivings  for  the  future  of  the  Church.  The 
organized  Christian  life  of  young  people  within  the 
Church  is  generally  represented  by  the  triviality  of 
Christian  Endeavor.  This  implies  no  criticism  of  the 
good  intentions  of  Christian  Endeavor,  but  of  the 
shallow  and  ineffectual  life  which  it  nourishes.  More- 
over, it  must  be  conceded  that  generally  the  organized 
life  of  our  young  people  has  not  borne  any  very  definite 
relation  to  the  main  currents  of  the  Church's  life,  nor 
has  it  shown  any  inclination  to  realize  the  larger  prob- 

105 


io6        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

lems  which  are  involved  in  the  promotion  of  the 
Kingdom  of  God.  This,  I  am  persuaded,  is  at  bottom 
due  to  a  defect  of  education.  And  if  it  be  true  that 
the  Church  has  been  haphazard  and  without  policy  in 
other  departments  of  its  activity,  it  is  certainly  also 
true  that  in  this  particular  sphere  of  educating  and 
training  its  young  people  it  has  exceeded  even  its  char- 
acteristic slipshodness  to  a  quite  immeasurable  extent. 

Now  let  it  be  said  as  beyond  controversy  that  the 
Church  can  only  secure  its  own  future  by  looking  to  its 
youth.  It  is  easy  to  say  that  God  will  look  after  the 
Church  and  the  future;  easy,  but  only  half-true.  God 
will  not  work  convenient  miracles  in  order  to  redeem 
our  bad  husbandry.  He  helps  those  who  help — Him. 
The  business  of  religious  education  is  central  to  a 
wise  ecclesiastical  policy. 

We  may  at  the  present  time  be  so  far  reassured  that 
there  is  some  kind  of  awakening  to  the  urgency  of  a 
reasonably  organized  and  worked-out  system  of  reli- 
gious education.  That  is  partly  the  reaction  of  the 
educational  advance  of  the  last  half-century;  partly  of 
the  growth  of  the  scientific  study  of  the  development 
of  the  young  mind;  partly  also  of  the  recognition 
(due  to  the  psychological  investigation  of  religious  ex- 
perience) that  the  bulk  of  the  religious  harvest  must 
be  reaped  in  adolescence.  Already  a  great  deal  of 
change  is  in  process  in  the  Sunday  school;  and  experi- 
ments in  organization  and  in  other  directions  are  in 
full  progress.  The  demand  is  growing  for  the  better 
equipment  and  fuller  preparatory  discipline  of  the  Sun- 
day school  teacher,  and  for  a  more  rationally  conceived 
arrangement  of  lesson  material.  But  those  who  are 
seeking  to  work  in  this  field  are  frequently  cast  into 


THE  HARVEST  OF  BAD  HUSBANDRY   107 

sheer  despair  by  the  tardiness  with  which  the  Church  is 
awakening  to  a  feehng  of  the  pressing  need  of  these 
things. 

But — and  I  am  speaking  with  some  knowledge  of 
the  matter — notwithstanding  the  slowly  growing  ac- 
ceptance of  the  principles  of  reform  in  this  connection, 
there  is  still  an  astonishing  inability  to  realize  the  need 
of  a  single  and  steady  point  of  view  in  the  matter. 
The  improvement  of  religious  education  is  proceeding 
piecemeal;  and  there  is  no  clear  perception  of  the  aim 
to  which  all  the  several  elements  in  the  case  should 
be  co-ordinated.  The  defectiveness  of  current  Chris- 
tianity is  not  primarily  a  defect  of  Christian  impulse, 
but  a  defect  of  real  understanding  of  the  way  in  which 
that  Christian  impulse  should  work  out.  The  back- 
ground of  ideas  concerning  the  Christian  ethic  in  the 
average  Christian  person  to-day  is  a  badly  arranged 
and  incomplete  patchwork;  and  the  result  is  that  the 
Christian  impulse  works  out  in  a  patchy,  fragmentary, 
incomplete  way.  There  Is  hardly  any  real  understand- 
ing of  the  nature  and  extent  of  the  total  moral  demand 
that  Christianity  makes  upon  us,  of  the  whole  moral 
liability  of  the  Christian  soul. 

Now  this  is  clearly  a  defect  of  knowledge,  and  there- 
fore a  defect  of  education.  This  must  be  remedied 
before  our  new  interest  in  religious  education  will 
achieve  the  right  results.  We  must  settle  down  to  a 
new  examination  of  the  Christian  ethic  in  the  full  light 
of  present  reality;  and  we  must,  therefore,  so  organize 
the  business  of  religious  education  that  there  shall  be 
a  fairly  complete  understanding  (of  course  in  a  simple 
and  general  way)  of  what  the  Christian  ethic  is  by 
the  time  the  young  life  enters  upon  the  period  of 


io8        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

adolescence,  in  which  the  permanent  religious  impulse 
is  usually  set  afoot.  When  a  young  lad  enters  upon  the 
Christian  life,  he  should  have  no  need  to  cry  out  in 
perplexity,  "Lord,  what  wilt  Thou  have  me  to  do?" 
He  should  at  least  have  sufficient  knowledge  and  un- 
derstanding already  in  his  own  mind  to  make  the  ques- 
tion superfluous.  This  does  not  mean  that  his  educa- 
tion is  necessarily  at  an  end.  Education  in  religion 
and  morals  is,  from  the  nature  of  the  case,  never  at 
an  end.  But  it  should  be,  before  adolescence  has  set 
in,  sufficiently  sound  and  complete  to  preserve  it  to  the 
end  on  sound  lines,  and  to  enable  the  Christian  soul 
from  the  time  of  its  awakening  to  give  a  sound  inter- 
pretation of  the  ideal  of  Christian  conduct. 
)  That  Christianity  does  not  commend  itself  to  the 
modern  world  is  due  in  no  little  degree  to  this  inherent 
defect  in  the  manner  of  education.  The  only  policy 
which  prevailed  until  recent  years  was  that  of  sending 
the  child  through  the  Bible  by  way  of  a  cycle  of 
courses  extending  over  seven  years.  But  this  scheme 
embodied  a  fatal  weakness,  insomuch  as  it  failed  to 
make  practical  acknowledgment  of  the  different  values 
of  different  parts  of  the  Bible  for  the  purpose  of  reli- 
gious education,  still  less  of  the  relative  relevancy  of 
the  various  parts  to  different  stages  of  the  educational 
process.  It  has,  moreover,  provided  no  guarantee  that 
the  parts  of  the  Bible  that  are  of  sovereign  importance 
to  a  Christian  education — the  Gospels — shall  fall  to  be 
given  at  the  most  critical  periods  of  development.  In 
addition  to  this  there  has  been  an  incapacity  to  recog- 
nize that  both  nature  and  extra-biblical  history  have 
a  legitimate  part  to  play  in  religious  education;  and 
that  the  latter  is  especially  necessary  in  order  to  reveal 


THE  HARVEST  OF  BAD  HUSBANDRY   109 

the  continuity  of  the  Christian  tradition  in  history  and 
to  hold  forth  the  Christian  witness  as  a  present-day 
reality.*  The  result  is  a  scrappy  and  shallow  acquaint- 
ance with  the  Scriptures,  the  entire  absence  of  a  sense 
of  the  relation  of  revelation  to  existing  conditions,  and 
a  thinness  and  mediocrity  of  spiritual  experience  which 
must  inevitably  fail  to  commend  Christianity  to  the 
onlooker.  There  can  be  no  adequate  and  secure 
foundation  of  Christian  life  and  experience  save  that  of 
a  scientifically  conceived  and  thorough  introduction 
into  the  spiritual  and  ethical  significance  of  the  Gospel. 

But  this  criticism  of  the  Christian  education  of  the 
past  is  purely  a  criticism  of  methods;  and  a  weightier 
criticism  lies  in  the  general  neglect  of  this  question  of 
education  altogether.  The  Church  is  only  at  this  late 
hour  realizing  the  importance  of  the  child  and  its  own 
educational  opportunities.  Hitherto  it  has  allowed  this 
part  of  its  responsibility  to  shift  for  itself,  and  has 
permitted  it  to  be  discharged  by  any  well-meaning  in- 
dividual who  would  volunteer  for  the  work.  It  has 
never  taken  the  matter  seriously.  It  is  paying  the 
penalty  of  this  neglect  to-day  in  the  loss  of  four-fifths 
of  its  Sunday  scholars,  and  in  the  prevailing  ineffect- 
ualness  of  the  large  proportion  of  its  membership. 
And  even  yet  it  is  not  recognizing  the  necessity  of 
movement  in  this  direction  with  the  readiness  which 
the  case  requires. 

It  is  the  absence  of  this  background  of  real  under- 
standing of  the  implicates  of  Christianity  that  explains 
what  I  have  called  the  triviality  of  Christian  Endeavor. 

*  Since  these  lines  were  written,  the  situation  has  changed  ma- 
terially by  the  resolution  of  the  Sunday  School  Union  to  institute 
a  scheme  of  completely  graded  lesson  material. 


I  TO         THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

This  movement  came  at  a  time  when  the  problem  of 
the  young  people  was  very  acute ;  and  it  seemed  to  be 
a  heaven-sent  provision  for  that  need.  It  contained 
exceedingly  valuable  elements;  in  particular,  it  empha- 
sized the  need  of  Christian  service,  and  committed  its 
members  to  some  kind  of  work.  But  it  was  initially 
weak  in  that  it  made  the  meeting  the  supreme  interest, 
and  its  distinctiveness  lay  in  the  obligation  it  imposed 
upon  its  members  to  take  some  part  other  than  singing 
in  every  meeting.  It  is,  of  course,  absurd  to  suppose 
that  every  individual  is  capable  of  taking,  or  that  God 
intended  that  he  should  take,  a  public  part  in  every 
meeting;  and  the  result  is  that  the  pledge,  when  it  is 
kept,  is  frequently  only  kept  by  a  formal  repetition  of 
passages  of  Scripture.  In  many  cases  it  appears  that 
the  pledge  is  not  steadily  kept.  Very  often  this  has 
meant  that  leadership  and  prominence  has  passed  into 
the  hands  of  persons  of  excellent  intention  but  of 
doubtful  fitness  for  so  considerable  a  responsibility. 
The  crowning  defect  of  the  movement  was,  and  is,  that 
it  made  no  provision  for  the  education  of  its  members 
in  a  systematic  way.  The  programme  of  the  weekly 
prayer-meeting  has  generally  provided  a  fairly  reason- 
able basis  for  the  devotional  aspect  of  the  gathering; 
but  no  one  who  is  at  all  acquainted  with  the  Christian 
Endeavor  meeting  will  venture  to  assert  that  this  was 
at  all  adequate  to  the  training  of  the  members  for  the 
larger  responsibilities  of  Christian  service.  Young 
people  should  be  and  are  prepared  to  be  guided  into 
sustained  and  systematic  study  of  the  meaning  and  pos- 
sibilities of  the  faith  they  profess;  and  Christian  En- 
deavor has  done  nothing  of  this  kind.  This  is  not  to 
say  that  Christian  Endeavor  has  not  done  much  valua- 


THE  HARVEST  OF  BAD  HUSBANDRY  in 

ble  work  and  turned  out  many  fine  Christian  souls. 
But  the  radical  inadequacy  of  its  basis  has  led  to  a  thin, 
superficial  life;  and  it  is  hardly  to  be  denied  that  for  the 
needs  and  purposes  of  Christianity  in  the  face  of  the 
modern  situation  the  Christian  Endeavor  movement  is 
exhausted.  The  time  has  come  for  something  more 
radical  and  systematic  in  its  educational  methods,  and 
more  exacting  in  its  demands,  if  the  Church  is  to  breed 
a  generation  of  men  and  women  who  have  both  the 
capacity  and  the  courage  to  undertake  and  carry 
through  the  necessary  labors  of  the  kingdom  of  God. 
The  Church  must  see  to  it  that  it  rears  a  race  which 
will  face  the  future  with  broad,  well-founded  con- 
structive ideals. 

It  is  probably  a  part  of  the  same  disorder  that  we 
meet  in  the  admitted  insufficiency  and  the  frequently 
unsatisfactory  quality  of  candidates  for  the  Christian 
ministry.  It  is  hardly  to  be  wondered  at,  since  we 
cannot  commend  Christianity  to  our  young  men  suffi- 
ciently to  keep  them  within  the  Church,  that  we  fail  to 
induce  them  to  enter  the  Christian  ministry.  The  peo- 
ple who  attribute  the  decline  in  the  number  of  min- 
isterial candidates  to  the  meagre  stipend  which  the 
ministry  provides  are  altogether  beside  the  mark.  It 
is  due  in  part  to  the  fact  that  we  have  failed  to  present 
the  claims  of  Christ  in  a  reasonable  and  ungainsayable 
way  to  our  young  men.  The  heroic  and  the  romantic 
in  our  young  men  are  not  yet  exhausted;  and  many  are 
persuaded  to  go  to  the  uncertainties  and  the  perils  of 
the  mission  field  who  would  hardly  have  entered  the 
ministry  at  home.  We  have  also  to  recognize  the  fact 
that  it  has  been  far  too  easy  to  enter  the  ministry.  A 
large  number  of  incapable  persons  have  been  able  to 


112        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

enter  it,  and  this  has  led  to  an  inevitable  lowering  of 
the  status  and  dignity  of  the  ministerial  office.  It  may 
seem  a  paradox,  but  I  am  persuaded  that  it  is  true^ — 
the  more  difficult  the  passage  into  the  ministry  is  made, 
the  larger  will  be  the  number  of  those  who  will  seek  to 
enter  it;  and  the  more  likely  will  it  be  that  the  men 
who  do  enter  the  ministry  will  be  the  right  men. 

But  why,  in  these  days  of  the  higher  education  of 
women,  should  the  ministry  be  the  monopoly  of  men? 

It  is  hardly  necessary  to  point  out  the  weakness  that 
accrues  to  modern  organized  Christianity  by  reason  of 
its  disunion,  for  that  is  an  evil  which  is  now  in  process 
of  disappearing.  Under  the  stress  of  the  example  af- 
forded by  the  churches  on  the  foreign  mission  field,  the 
churches  at  home  are  conscious  of  a  more  real  feeling 
after  unity  than  has  ever  been  known.  It  may  be  that 
we  have  traversed  the  full  cycle  of  the  special  em- 
phases upon  the  diverse  elements  of  Christianity  out  of 
which  our  sectarianism  has  issued;  and  that  the  very 
process  of  time  is  bringing  us  face  to  face  with  the  need 
of  a  new  synthesis.  It  is  probably  a  far  cry  to  the  day 
of  reunion  in  England  because  the  causes  of  division 
are  deeper  and  more  numerous  than  in  most  other 
lands,  apart,  of  course,  from  the  chasm  which  yawns 
between  Romanism  and  Protestantism.  The  tenacious 
adhesion  of  the  Anglican  Church  to  its  State  connec- 
tion, and  the  advance  among  the  clergy  of  the  sacer- 
dotal school,  constitute  barriers  to  English  reunion 
which  are  at  present  simply  and  completely  impassable. 
Among  the  Free  Churches  the  time  for  union  has  not 
yet  arrived,  though  it  is  probably  not  so  far  off  as  some 
would  imagine.  The  chief  hindrance  is  a  bad  sense  of 
proportion.     Meantime,  there  will  be  a  great  deal  of 


THE  HARVEST  OF  BAD  HUSBANDRY    113 

overlapping,  and  a  criminal  waste  of  energy;  and  the 
spectacle  of  disunion  will  continue  to  provide  the  hos- 
tile critic  with  his  stock  demonstration  of  the  failure  of 
Christianity.  Happily,  however,  out  of  England  the 
prospects  of  evangelical  reunion  are  far  more  rosy. 

There  is  one  more  fact  of  our  modern  life  which 
speaks  of  the  exhaustion  of  current  Christianity.  It  is 
the  multiplication  of  quasi-religious  movements  like 
Christian  Science  and  the  New  Thought.  There  can 
be  no  doubt  that  these  cults  provide  some  satisfaction 
which  the  churches  are  failing  to  give.  The  intellectual 
chaos  of  the  Christian  Science  cult  needs  no  demonstra- 
tion ;  nevertheless,  it  apparently  does  open  the  door  to  a 
certain  peace  of  mind.  But  it  would  hardly  have  the 
vogue  it  has  except  in  an  age  which  has  become  neurotic 
by  reason  of  its  extreme  feverishness;  and,  apart  from 
its  "  healing  "of  physical  maladies,  it  has  no  nostrum 
which  the  Church  does  not  also  possess,  but  has  lost 
through  atrophy  the  faculty  of  using.  Within  the 
Church  itself  the  characteristic  teachings  which  are 
associated  with  the  Keswick  Convention  and  other  holi- 
ness movements  are  evidence  of  the  exhaustion  of  the 
current  Christian  impulse  in  the  Church ;  and  while  the 
Keswick  movement  has  retained  a  measure  of  sanity, 
there  are  other  endeavors  to  resuscitate  Christianity 
of  which  so  much  cannot  be  said.  The  Pentecostal 
Association  or  Convention  for  seeking  the  gift  of 
tongues,  which  met  in  Sunderland  in  May,  191 1,  and 
which  is  carrying  on  an  extensive  propaganda  in  many 
countries,  seems  to  show  that  where  the  Christian  im- 
pulse is  not  exhausted  it  is  running  to  seed. 


\ 


XII 

THE  SIGNS  OF  THE  TIMES 

IT  has  been  the  purpose  of  the  preceding  chapters  to 
survey  rapidly  some  of  the  main  features  of  the 
life  of  the  time;  and  while  we  are  able  to  rejoice 
'  in  the  advent  of  a  new  constructive  spirit  of  brother- 
hood, We  have  to  set  over  against  it  the  exhaustion  of 
the  traditional  syntheses  in  thought  and  religion,  and 
the  moral  ineffectualness  of  our  modern  way  of  life. 
Nevertheless,  may  it  not  be  that  all  these  diverse  cir- 
cumstances point  to  a  single  issue,  and  indicate  one 
comprehensive  need? 

It  is  clearly  a  time  of  change,  and  therefore  of  some 
confusion.  Life  has  fallen  into  a  desperate  tangle. 
There  are  very  few  persons  whose  minds  have  not  felt 
the  pressure  of  the  materialistic  thought  of  the  last  two 
generations;  and  though  they  have  not  put  up  the 
white  flag  over  the  whole  of  life,  yet  they  have  in  part 
surrendered  to  the  siege  of  these  tendencies.  It  was 
impossible  altogether  to  deny  the  claims  put  forward 
on  behalf  of  physical  science  in  the  face  of  its  wonder- 
ful achievements;  and  when  it  claimed  to  speak  the  last 
word  upon  the  whole  of  life,  we  felt  constrained  to  ad- 
mit that  it  had  a  right  at  least  to  say  a  good  deal.  The 
inevitable  result  has  been  a  lowering  of  the  spiritual 
banner,  and  decline  into  a  confusion  of  life  which  could 
only  be  endured  by  dividing  life  up  into  water-tight 

114 


THE  SIGNS  OF  THE  TIMES  115 

compartments.  It  has  been  a  commonplace  for  our 
generation  that  "  religion  has  nothing  to  do  with  busi- 
ness," and  "  that  there  is  no  room  for  sentiment  in 
business."  We  have  been  trying  to  "  reconcile  "  science 
and  religion  as  though  there  were  an  essential  antipathy 
between  them,  or  as  though,  if  there  were  such  antipa- 
thy, we  could  by  subtlety  of  argument  overcome  it. 
We  have  staked  out  a  little  area  of  our  life  into  which 
we  have  crowded  our  spiritual  ideals,  and  have  left  the 
rest  open  to  the  invasion  of  the  time-spirit  without 
any  real  inquiry  whether  its  implicates  could  possibly 
subsist  permanently  side  by  side  with  the  religious 
ideals  which  we  have  been  unwilling  to  abandon.  The 
consequence  is  that  we  have  done  lip-service  to  our 
religious  ideals  on  the  first  day  of  the  week  and  have 
left  them  to  shift  for  themselves  on  the  remaining  six. 
But  the  soul  cannot  stand  such  inner  schism  without 
suffering  grave  injury,  and  we  are  paying  the  penalty 
of  it  to-day  in  the  flat  and  dull  mediocrity  of  our 
morals  and  culture.  The  heroic  note  has  been  lost  from 
modern  life;  and  literature  and  art  are  generally  de- 
void of  the  bound  and  vigor  which  animate  them  when 
they  have  a  genuine  and  thoroughgoing  spiritual  in- 
spiration. They  do  not  cut  to  the  quick  of  our  souls. 
They  do  not  draw  blood,  because  there  is  no  blood  in 
them.  It  is  only  a  spiritually  driven  literature  or  art 
that  can  cut  to  the  core  of  life,  and  comparatively  little 
of  the  prodigious  energy  spent  to-day  upon  literature 
and  art  touches  even  the  fringe  of  what  is  most  vital 
and  worthy  in  our  manhood.  It  leaves  us  morally 
where  it  found  us.  The  dominant  character  of  our 
time  is  mediocrity;  the  epic  touch  is  unknown.  The 
Lord  seems  to  have  ceased  making  giants,  in  morality 


ii6        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

or  culture,  and  certainly  this  is  not  compensated  for  by 
any  appreciable  elevation  of  the  race. 

It  is  hardly  necessary  to  examine  in  further  detail 
how  the  materialistic  temper  has  affected  our  various 
polities  and  ideas  of  progress.  We  have  conceived 
social  reform  almost  exclusively  in  terms  of  improved 
physical  environment  and  of  economic  readjustments. 
We  have  frankly  subordinated  the  great  mechanical 
and  scientific  achievements  of  the  last  century  to  im- 
mediate personal  ends  of  comfort  and  self-aggrandize- 
ment. Our  imperial  ideals  are  thoroughly  commer- 
cialized. Do  we  not  say  that  "  trade  follows  the  flag  "  ? 
This  nation  had  once  a  great  tradition  of  chivalry  in 
its  foreign  and  colonial  enterprise.  This  has  been  ef- 
faced by  the  lust  of  markets.  We  have  become  a  nation 
of  shopkeepers  indeed.  Our  morality  is  unashamedly 
prudential.  We  have  lost  touch  with  those  deeper  sanc- 
tions and  ideals  which  can  give  our  morality  such  stiff- 
ness of  impulse  as  will  neither  compromise  nor  ask  for 
quarter.  I  am  not  unmindful  of  the  survival,  in  the 
professions  and  in  individuals  of  all  callings,  of  an 
idealism  and  a  sense  of  honor  and  obligation  which 
are  altogether  admirable.  But  these  are  the  more 
marked  because  they  are  so  exceptional.  Our  modern 
civilization  can  produce  few  persons  who  can  enter 
into  the  spirit  of  Mr,  Herbert  Trench's  fine  lines: — 

If  thou  hast  squandered  years  to  grave  a  g^em 

Commissioned  by  thine  absent  Lord; 

And  while  'tis  incomplete,  others  would  bribe  thy  needy 

skill  to  them. 
Dismiss  them  to  the  street. 

It  is  not  hard  to  imagine  that  Wordsworth  raised 


THE  SIGNS  OF  THE  TIMES  117 

from  the  dead  would  write  for  this  generation  another 
sonnet  which  began — 

The  World  is  too  much  with  us.     Soon  and  late, 
Getting  and  spending,  we  lay  waste  our  powers. 

I  have  already  tried  to  trace  the  origin  of  this  dis- 
astrous materialism,  and  have  endeavored  to  show  that 
it  is  the  virtual  negation  of  that  spirit  of  brotherhood 
the  advent  of  which  is  the  most  cheerful  and  encourag- 
ing feature  of  the  time.  Agnosticism  is  a  brave  creed, 
and  they  have  been  brave  men  who  have  held  it;  for 
they  have  not  shirked  the  moral  demands  which  a  so- 
cial life  makes,  and.  Indeed,  have  served  a  high  ethical 
ideal  with  loyalty  notwithstanding  that  their  creed 
provided  no  adequate  dynamic  in  the  shape  of  either  an 
antecedent  impulse  or  an  ultimate  goal.  But  material- 
ism is  an  easy  creed :  it  has  no  practical  implicates  for 
the  individual  beyond  "  Eat,  drink,  and  be  merry,  for 
to-morrow  we  die."  It  is  a  philosophy  of  selfishness, 
and  no  humanitarian  passion  in  its  advocates  can  si- 
lence the  cui  bono  of  the  natural  man  to  whom  they 
may  commend  humanitarian  courses.  The  materialist 
can  have  no  gospel  of  humanity  at  all  save  only  as  he 
breaks  with  the  logic  of  his  system.  A  creed  must  be 
judged  by  its  ethic;  and  the  ethic  of  materialism  may 
be  seen  in  the  jungle.  It  is  the  ethic  of  the  ape  and 
the  tiger.  But  to  the  man  whose  life  leads  him  into  the 
great  highways  of  human  existence,  it  is  being  con- 
stantly brought  home  that  human  society  needs  not 
more  of  the  individualism  of  the  jungle  but  more  of 
that  spirit  and  practice  of  brotherhood  which  alone  can 
make  a  social  life  possible  and  tolerable,  and  which, 
since  man  is  social  in  a  sense  in  which  no  other  animal 


ii8        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

is,  is  the  predestined  principle  of  genuine  human  devel- 
opment. This  principle  of  brotherhood  requires  a  spir- 
itual foundation.  It  cannot  survive  except  it  be  con- 
ceived and  born  of  a  thoroughgoing  spiritual  idealism. 

But  it  is  not  only  the  coming  of  the  principle  of 
brotherhood  that  creates  the  demand  for  the  spiritual 
point  of  view,  but  the  very  poverty  of  our  modern  way 
of  life.  The  note  of  mediocrity  in  our  general  morality 
and  culture  reflects  itself  in  a  meagre  and  inadequate 
personal  life.  We  are  living  from  hand  to  mouth — in 
a  perpetual  rush.  We  are  laying  up  no  real  resources 
of  actual  happiness,  no  reserves  of  abiding  joy.  We 
have  put  ourselves  out  of  tune  for  the  more  permanent 
interests  of  life. 

The  scale  of  values  which  governs  our  modern  life 
does  not  lead  to  satisfaction  and  rest.  It  rather  makes 
for  hunger  and  restlessness.  The  things  at  the  top  of 
the  scale — money  and  the  things  money  can  buy — do 
not  satisfy.  They  always  leave  us,  however  much  we 
may  gain  of  them,  asking  for  more.  There  is  no 
finality  in  them — nothing  to  rest  in.  And  yet  our 
whole  life  is  subordinated  to  them.  We  have  sub- 
ordinated our  scientific  and  mechanical  triumphs  to 
them.  Men  are  dominated  by  the  passion  of  money- 
making.  They  cannot  make  enough  money  or  make  it 
quickly  enough,  and  so  they  plunge  themselves  and 
hire  others  to  plunge  themselves  into  this  amazing 
vortex  of  hurried  barter  and  speculation.  Meantime 
the  things  that  might  make  for  peace  of  mind  and 
completeness  of  life  are  away  at  the  bottom  of  our 
scale  of  values;  are,  indeed,  sometimes  off  the  scale 
altogether.  And  there  is  no  hope  for  us  but  in  delib- 
erately turning  the  scale  upside  down. 


THE  SIGNS  OF  THE  TIMES  119 

I  recall  that  Mr.  Chesterton  says  somewhere  that  it 
is  a  fallacy  to  suppose  that  It  does  not  matter  what  a 
man's  philosophy  is,  and  that  it  is  a  question  whether, 
in  the  end,  anything  else  matters.  Every  definite  sus- 
tained way  of  life  has  a  quite  definite  kind  of  philos- 
ophy behind  it,  and  the  philosophy  which  lies  at  the 
back  of  our  modern  life  is  a  frank  materialism.  We 
can  only  reverse  our  scale  of  values  by  a  definite  break 
with  materialism,  and  just  because  the  seeds  of  it  are 
inlaid  in  our  human  nature,  by  keeping  on  breaking 
with  it. 

On  one  occasion,  when  His  disciples  had  toiled  the 
night  through  and  had  caught  nothing,  Jesus  asked, 
"  Children,  have  ye  aught  to  eat  ?  "  And  they  an- 
swered Him,  "  No."  That  is  our  condition.  Bread 
we  have  in  more  or  less  sufficiency;  but  man  lives  not 
by  bread  alone.  We  need  some  other  provender;  and 
that  more  impalpable  provender  our  modern  way  of 
life  does  not  provide  for  us.  We  are  in  a  chronic  state 
of  famine  so  far  as  the  deeper  hungers  of  our  manhood 
are  concerned.  The  only  policy  which  is  going  to  pro- 
duce different  results  is  that  which  Jesus  indicated  to 
His  disciples  on  that  occasion :  "  Cast  your  net  on  the 
right  side  of  the  ship,  and  draw."  We  require  a  new 
policy  of  life — a  thoroughgoing  renunciation  of  the 
old.  From  our  blind  uncalculating  materialism,  from 
our  servitude  to  gold,  to  a  definite  and  sustained  spirit- 
ual life — that  alone  is  our  salvation. 

It  is  to  the  recovery  of  a  spiritual  idealism  that  I 
believe  all  the  signs  are  pointing.  When  Paul  said  that 
the  Law  had  been  the  schoolmaster  to  lead  to  Christ, 
what  did  he  mean?  If  we  are  to  assume,  as  I  think 
we  must,  that  he  is  interpreting  his  people's  history 


I20        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

in  the  light  of  his  own  experience,  he  meant  this.  The 
Law  had  led  them  up  to  a  certain  point;  but  it  was  a 
point  at  which  they  could  not  remain.  It  had  provided 
certain  satisfactions  which  only  revealed  and  accentu- 
ated the  necessity  of  some  last  satisfaction  greater  than 
the  rest.  But  the  Law  was  unable  to  carry  them  be- 
yond that  point.  It  had  carried  them  just  so  far  as  to 
produce  an  irresistible  demand  for  a  satisfaction  which 
it  could  not  itself  provide.  It  had  come  to  the  end  of 
its  tether.  But  they  could  not  remain  where  the  Law 
had  left  them.  They  had  to  push  on;  and  there  was 
only  one  way  in  which  they  could  proceed.  Since  the 
law  had  broken  down,  they  must  trust  to  faith  to  carry 
them  to  their  journey's  end.  The  bankruptcy  of  the 
Law  had  compelled  them  to  make  the  venture  of  faith. 
Now,  as  we  shall  see  later  on,  this  antithesis  of  law 
and  faith  is  parallel  to  the  classical  Pauline  antithesis 
of  flesh  and  spirit,  and  when  that  is  borne  in  mind  the 
analogy  of  the  situation  which  Paul  describes  and  that 
which  exists  to-day  will  be  seen  to  be  very  close.  The 
very  immensity  of  our  scientific  and  technical  achieve- 
ments has  left  us  unsatisfied;  is,  indeed,  more  and  more 
laying  bare  the  need  of  deeper  satisfactions  than  those 
which  the  physical  universe  provides.  The  very  rigor 
of  the  scientific  method  of  the  last  half-century  has 
brought  it  to  a  blind  alley,  after  failing  to  provide  us 
with  the  knowledge  of  the  things  which  most  of  all 
concern  us.  Just  as  the  ethical  discipline  of  the  Jews 
led  them  up  to  a  point  at  which  they  felt  a  new  need 
and  demanded  a  new  power  to  satisfy  it,  so  the  scien- 
tific discipline  of  our  own  time  has  brought  us  up  to 
a  point  beyond  which  it  is  inadequate  to  carry  us,  and 
yet  at  which  we  are  unable  to  rest.    And  just  as  the 


THE  SIGNS  OF  THE  TIMES  121 

next  step  of  the  Jew  was  to  a  spiritual  view  of  life,  so 
our  next  step  must  be — for  it  is  the  only  possible  and 
thinkable  step — to  a  spiritual  construction  of  the  uni- 
verse. 

It  will  complete  our  analogy  if  we  recall  the  fact 
that  when  Paul  was  writing,  Judaism  as  a  religious 
system  was  old  and  decrepit  and  exhausted.  Our  tradi- 
tional Christianity  has  come  to  the  same  impasse.  Not, 
indeed,  altogether  by  reason  of  the  same  circum- 
stances; yet  there  is  a  sufficiently  similar  decadence  of 
spirituality  to  justify  our  parallel.  Just  as  Judaism 
made  way  for  Apostolic  Christianity,  so  the  organized 
Christianity  of  to-day  must  make  way  for  a  more 
radically  and  comprehensively  spiritual  reconstruction 
of  the  Gospel  way  of  life.  Already  the  word  has  been 
given.  The  letter  of  the  Edinburgh  Missionary  Con- 
ference to  the  Churches  of  Christendom  speaks  of 
God's  demand  upon  us  for  "  a  new  order  of  life." 
Nothing  is  adequate  to  the  modern  situation  short  of 
a  renewed  Christianity  which  shall  be  as  superior  to 
our  current  conceptions  of  it  as  Apostolic  Christianity 
was  superior  to  Judaism.  But  it  will  be  Christianity 
still,  for  the  person  of  Jesus  Christ  is  final  and  defini- 
tive in  its  bearing  upon  manhood. 

It  belongs  to  a  later  stage  to  consider  in  some  detail 
the  implications  of  this  tendency  in  reference  to  Chris- 
tianity. A  word  may  be  permitted  here  as  to  what 
appears  to  be  the  present  task  of  philosophy.  This 
may  be  described  as  the  construction  of  a  sane  and 
uncompromising  spiritual  idealism — not  the  idealism  of 
the  Hegelian  tradition,  which  is  insufficient  for  the 
need  of  human  life,  because  the  Hegelian  ideal  is 
already  real  and  absolute,  and  leaves  no  room  for  per- 


122         THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

sfonal  initiative  and  work.  All  the  freedom  it  gives 
is  the  freedom  to  assent  to  what  already  is.  Just  as 
naturalism  makes  human  consciousness  merely  the 
upper  reach  of  the  sense-life,  so  the  Hegelian  idealism 
makes  it  no  more  than  the  lower  reach  of  the  Abso- 
lute. Neither  view  gives  real  independence  or  free- 
dom; and  it  will  require  more  showing  than  this  to 
make  the  common  man  disbelieve  in  the  reality  of  his 
freedom  or  the  indivisible  integrity  of  his  personality. 
We  need  a  philosophy,  then,  possessing  power  to  pre- 
sent a  spiritual  idealism  which  will  appeal  and  be  ac- 
ceptable to  all  men,  and  specially  to  the  average  man — 
an  idealism  which  will  respect  his  belief  in  his  own 
personality  and  power  of  initiative,  and  will  do  this  by 
calling  him  to  real  work.  This  means  that  the  new 
idealism  is  one  that  a  man  can  work  for — an  idealism 
in  the  making.  All  its  implications  must  be  melioristic; 
it  must  bear  directly  on  the  actual  life  that  men  are 
living.  It  must  tell  us  that  though  the  ills  of  the  uni- 
verse are  real,  they  are  remediable;  and  that  the  in- 
completeness of  the  world  is  the  promise  of  its  com- 
pletion. It  will  leave  the  static  Absolute  to  the  select 
few  who  can  live  by  it.  It  will  demand  a  categorical 
breach  with  all  forms  of  naturalism,  and  lay  all  the 
emphasis  upon  the  superior  reality  of  the  spiritual  life. 
It  must  hold  to  the  underlying  unity  of  the  spiritual 
life  of  the  whole  world,  and  the  final  unity  to  which 
our  deepest  intuitions  tell  us  things  are  tending.  Prag- 
matism (particularly  in  Dr.  Schiller's  hands)  came  to 
many  minds  with  a  promise  of  relief  from  the  severe 
intellectualism  of  the  Hegelian  tradition;  but  it  is  viti- 
ated for  most  people  by  the  pluralism  which  its  chief 
protagonist,    the    late   William   James,    found    in   it. 


THE  SIGNS  OF  THE  TIMES  123 

Pluralism  is  not  satisfying.  It  defines  the  future  in  too 
indeterminate  a  way — leaves  it,  as  It  were,  in  a  tangle 
of  loose  ends.  James  says  (in  a  passage  already 
quoted)  that  no  philosophy  will  command  assent  except 
it  "  define  the  future  congruously  with  our  spontane- 
ous powers."  And  straightway  he  propounds  a  philos- 
ophy which  overlooks  what  he  himself  has  defined  as 
our  "  emotional  response  to  the  idea  of  oneness." 
Whatever  else  we  were  born,  we  were  born  monists. 

It  is  encouraging  to  believe  that  in  this  respect  we 
are  already  in  sight  of  the  Promised  Land.  The  teach- 
ing of  Rudolf  Eucken  is  beginning  to  tell  effectually 
upon  our  thinking.  His  philosophy  is  essentially  the 
gospel  of  the  supremacy  of  the  spiritual  life.  Like  the  i 
Pragmatist,  he  claims  a  place  for  the  whole  man  in 
the  business  of  life  and  thought;  but,  unlike  the  Prag- 
matist, he  sees  man  as  more  than  narrowly  human. 
He  sees  in  him  the  emergence  of  something  super- 
human, divine;  and  he  attempts  such  a  philosophical 
reconstruction  of  life  from  the  point  of  view  of  spirit- 
ual idealism  as  our  present  extremity  calls  for.  And 
he  is  calling  us  to  a  true  sense  of  the  values  of  things 
by  demanding  a  thorough  and  unqualified  application 
of  a  spiritual  point  of  view  over  the  whole  area  of  life. 

Eucken's  vogue  is  immense  in  his  own  country;  and, 
however  badly  off  we  may  have  been  in  this  country, 
there  Is  no  doubt  that  we  were  never  so  deeply  involved 
in  materialistic  views  as  Germany  has  been.  The 
unspirituality  of  the  Kirche,  the  inordinate  license  of.* 
much  German  biblical  criticism,  the  epidemic  of  mili- 
tarism, all  show  how  greatly  Germany  had  departed  \ 
from  a  spiritual  way  of  life.  The  vogue  of  Eucken 
betokens   a   deep   and   widespread   reaction;   and   he 


124        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

would  be  rash  indeed  who  would  deny  the  real  possi- 
bility of  seeing  in  Germany  on  a  very  large  scale  what 
one  of  the  prophets  calls  "  a  famine  for  the  hearing  of 
the  word  of  the  Lord." 

Nearer  home  it  is  possible  to  detect  similar  tend- 
encies. That  shrewd  observer  and  stimulating  writer, 
Mr.  J.  A.  Hobson,*  expresses  the  view  that  we  are  on 
the  verge  of  a  renascence.  He  sees  the  beginnings  of 
it  in  a  new  spirit  of  literature,  art,  and  drama.  He 
points  out  that  the  prevailing  fashions  in  thought,  the 
old  party  watchwords,  the  old  religious  traditions  are 
exhausted,  and  that  we  are  living  in  a  time  of  short 
intellectual  leases,  due  to  the  discovery  of  defects  in 
all  the  traditional  syntheses;  and  he  adds:  "What  is 
needed  is  not  so  much  a  system  of  thought,  whether 
monism  or  pluralism,  not  so  much  a  single  faith,  re- 
ligious, ethical,  intellectual,  aesthetic,  practical,  as  a  sin- 
\g\t  spirit  in  the  conduct  of  life."  It  is  not  difficult  to 
Isee  that  the  writer  is  looking  to  such  a  recovery  of  a 
[sound  spiritual  idealism  as  we  are  now  contemplating. 
I  May  it  not  be  that  in  all  of  us  in  whom  the  Spirit 
'still  stirs,  be  it  ever  so  feebly,  there  is,  perhaps  without 
our  knowing  it,  even  now  a  preparation,  an  expectancy, 
a  waiting,  and  that,  sooner  than  we  know,  we  shall 
pass  out  of  the  bondage  of  things  into  the  freedom  of 
the  Spirit  ?  "  Is  there  not,"  asks  Dora  Greenwell, 
**  now  among  us,  a  core  of  vital  religion,  a  hidden 
Church,  waiting  as  a  fruit  tree  in  spring  will  wait  long, 
all  set  with  blossom,  for  a  day  warm  enough  to  blow 
in,  a  day  when  it  will  blow  all  at  once?  " 

*  "  The  Task  of  Realism,"  English  Review,  October,  1909. 


PART  III 
THE  SPIRITUAL  POINT  OF  VIEW 


XIII 
THE  TRUE  SUPERMAN 

BEFORE  we  embark  upon  our  examination  of 
the  probable  implications  of  the  emergence  of 
the  spiritual  point  of  view,  it  may  be  as  well  to 
review  briefly  the  ground  already  traversed.  We  have 
endeavored  to  analyze  in  a  general  way  two  sets  of 
circumstances.  First  of  all,  in  our  examination  of  the 
Average  Man,  we  sought  to  discover  the  main  general 
tendencies  and  influences  which  have  produced  the  pre- 
vailing atmosphere  in  which  the  mass  of  ordinary  folk 
live,  and  which  stamps  its  own  character  upon  them. 
It  appeared  that  the  chief  force  at  work  in  this  region 
was  the  indigenous  bias  of  the  natural  man  to  materi- 
alistic ways  of  life,  confirmed  and  reinforced  more  or 
less  directly  by  the  materialistic  character  of  the  cur- 
rent thought  of  the  last  half -century. 

From  this  we  set  out  on  another  survey  of  the  pres- 
ent situation  as  it  appears  in  the  existing  tendencies, 
social,  intellectual,  religious,  of  our  time.  We  found 
that  we  were  able  to  take  heart  of  grace  from  the  ob- 
vious resurgence  of  the  spirit  of  brotherhood,  but  that 
we  had  to  confess  the  virtual  exhaustion  of  modern 
ways  of  life  and  modes  of  thought,  and  the  apparent 
bankruptcy  of  the  current  Christian  tradition.  Never- 
theless we  have  endeavored  to  persuade  ourselves  that 
historical  analogy  justifies  us  in  believing  that  all  these 

127 


128        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

circumstances  taken  together  point  to  a  coming  re- 
nascence of  faith, and  a  revival  of  spiritual  ways  of  life 
and  thought  and  of  spiritual  standards  of  judgment. 

It  now  becomes  necessary  to  inquire  what  exactly 
the  spiritual  life  means  and  what  results  for  thought 
and  conduct  are  likely  to  accrue  from  a  frank,  com- 
plete acceptance  and  application  of  a  spiritual  point  of 
view.  We  shall  endeavor,  in  a  very  diffident  and 
slight  fashion,  to  appraise  these  probable  consequences. 
But  first  of  all  we  must  consider  what  the  grounds  are 
upon  which  our  faith  in  the  primacy  of  the  spiritual 
life  and  the  reality  of  a  spiritual  universe  rests,  and 
with  what  authority  we  may  venture  to  call  upon  the 
average  man  to  change  his  way  of  life. 

There  are  two  ways — and,  at  bottom,  only  two  ways 
— in  which  we  may  regard  the  world.  We  may  look 
upon  it  either  as  having  all  its  significance  within  it- 
self, or  as  having  no  significance  worthy  the  name  ex- 
cept as  it  subserves  and  leads  to  something  without  and 
beyond  itself.  We  may  say,  with  the  scientist,  that 
"  there  is  an  end  in  the  world  that  is  worth  all  the 
world,"  and  that  all  human  striving  is  to  enable  him  to 
move  on  "  to  some  great  worthy  unknown  end  in  this 
world."  *  We  may  go  so  far  as  to  define  this  result  as 
*'  perfect  fitness  for  a  social  environment  "  t ;  but  it  is 
attained  by  purely  natural  processes  and  realized 
within  this  concrete  phenomenal  world.  We  may,  on 
the  other  hand,  deny  the  validity  of  this  view,  and  as- 
sert that  we  can  only  discover  the  total  significance  of 
this  world  in  the  light  of  another  universe  which  lies 
outside  sense-perceptions.    The  question  resolves  itself 

*R.  K.  Duncan,  "The  New  Knowledge,"  p.  257. 
f  Saleeby,  "  Organic  Evolution,"  p.  119. 


THE  TRUE  SUPERMAN  129 

into  this :  Is  there  anything  or  is  there  nothing  beyond 
what  we  can  see,  and  handle,  and  prove? 

The  common-sense  answer  to  a  question  of  this  sort 
may  be  stated  in  this  way. 

First,  physical  nature  seems  to  have  reached  its 
high-water  mark  in  man.  The  process  of  physical 
evolution  has  apparently  been  arrested  at  this  point; 
and  all  the  changes  we  may  discern  in  the  structure  of 
the  human  organism  during  the  whole  time  for  which 
we  have  any  valid  data  amount  to  little  more  than  mi- 
nor local  variations.  If  there  is  to  be  development  and 
progress  in  the  future,  it  may  be  in  the  region  of  "  psy- 
chical characteristics," as  Dr.  Saleeby  would  say,  and  as 
the  result  of  processes  essentially  identical  with  those 
which  have  produced  the  physical  organism  of  man;  or 
in  the  region  of  morals,  as  Huxley  would  say,  by  "  a 
course  of  conduct  which  is  in  all  respects  opposed  to 
that  which  leads  to  success  in  the  cosmic  struggle  for 
existence."  * 

Second,  man  is  conscious  of  inward  stirrings  and 
cravings  and  beckonings  which  are  incapable  of  com- 
plete satisfaction  or  explanation  in  the  sense-world. 
The  materialist  will,  no  doubt,  assert  that  these  inward 
movements  are  merely  cerebral  agitations,  brain-storms 
which  are  to  be  accounted  for  on  purely  physical  lines. 
Apart,  however,  from  the  fact  that  this  explanation 
raises  more  questions  than  it  settles,  the  scientist  is  yet 
to  appear  who  will  lay  bare  the  physical  process  which 
is  supposed  to  give  rise  to  the  "  loves,  hopes,  longings  " 
that  stir  us.  The  human  soul  is  the  great  unsolved, 
insoluble  problem  of  physical  science.  These  instinctive 
cravings  and  strivings  have  every  right  to  be  regarded 
*  Huxley,  "  Evolution  and  Ethics,"  Romanes  Lect.,  1893. 


I30        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

as  being  as  authentic  as  any  other  instinctive  tendencies 
which  we  may  discern  in  the  physical  world.  I  have 
referred  to  the  saying  of  Romanes  that  elsewhere  in 
the  animal  world  there  is  no  such  thing  as  an  instinct 
"  pointing  aimlessly."  *  It  is,  therefore,  at  least  as 
logical  to  infer  from  these  instinctive  activities  and 
tendencies  the  existence  of  a  spiritual  universe  to 
which  they  seem  to  point  as  it  is  to  attribute  them  to 
brain  processes  about  which  we  can  only  speculate. 

It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  indicate  the  view  to  which 
the  average  intelligence  would  ascribe  the  balance  of 
probability  and  the  greater  reasonableness.  It  may  be 
admitted  that  from  a  severely  intellectual  standpoint 
the  greater  risk  of  error  attaches  to  the  acceptance  of 
what  may  be  called  the  religious  view;  but  it  is  quite 
clear  that  the  greater  risk  to  the  zvhole  man  is  involved 
in  its  rejection.  Satisfactory  antecedent  demonstration 
of  either  view  is  from  the  nature  of  the  case  out  of  the 
question,  and  the  pragmatic  is  the  only  available  test 
of  validity.  This  test,  however,  is  so  intimately  per- 
sonal and  private  that  it  can  hardly  amount  to  a  dem- 
onstration of  a  universal  truth,  unless  we  are  prepared 
to  admit  that  the  immense  preponderance  of  those  who 
accept  the  religious  view,  after  so  many  ages  of  prac- 
tical test  and  application,  amounts  to  a  virtual  proof  of 
its  validity.  But  for  the  ordinary  man  the  issue  will 
probably  be  settled  when  he  realizes  that  ultimately  the 
only  alternative  to  the  spiritual  view  of  life  is  that  he 
should  remain  content  to  look  upon  life  as  a  cow  does. 
If  this  be  denied,  and  it  be  asserted  that  man's  superi- 
ority is  demonstrated'by  his  triumphs  over  nature  and 
his  subordination  of  it  to  his  own  uses,  the  sufficient 
*  "Thoughts  on  Religion,"  p.  82. 


THE  TRUE  SUPERMAN  131 

answer  is  that  the  cow  also  in  its  own  way  triumphs 
over  nature — and  consumes  a  part  of  it.  If  man  is  not 
spiritual,  he  can  have  no  necessities  differing  in  kind 
from  those  of  the  brute.  Even  the  human  distinctive- 
ness of  self-consciousness  on  the  naturalistic  hypothesis 
becomes  the  natural  result  of  purely  physical  move- 
ments:  it  belongs  to  the  earth  even  if  it  stand  two  or 
three  removes  from  it.  A  materialistic  conception 
of  man  cannot  in  the  end  indicate  any  human  interests 
which  are  different  in  kind  (however  unlike  they  may 
be  in  form  and  expression)  from  the  interests  of  the 
lower  animals.  To  admit  that  there  are  interests  or 
needs  which  are  generically  different  is  to  give  the 
case  away.  The  difference  must  be  explained;  that  is 
to  say,  the  soul  must  be  explained. 

There  is  really  no  alternative — for  the  ordinary  per- 
son at  least — but  a  spiritual  point  of  view  for  the  inter- 
pretation and  management  of  life.  The  extremely  sci- 
entific person  may  be  able  to  devise  a  satisfying 
working  hypothesis  for  life  out  of  his  materialistic  phi- 
losophy; but  the  ordinary  person,  who  is  not  prepared 
to  disbelieve  in  the  authenticity  of  his  strivings  after  a 
larger  universe  than  this  of  his  sensible  experience, 
must  have  recourse  to  the  perhaps  less  logical  but  cer- 
tainly more  reasonable  and  efficient  spiritual  interpre- 
tation of  things.  And  that  not  as  an  addendum  or  an 
annexe  to  other  points  of  view,  but  as  fundamental, 
subsuming  and  giving  its  own  color  and  perspective  to 
every  other  point  of  view  that  may  be  necessary  for 
the  proper  management  of  life.  For,  in  the  last 
analysis,  what  the  spiritual  viewpoint  implies  is  that 
we  belong  to  God ;  we  came  out  from  God  and  have  a 
destiny  in  God.     Our  life  is  continuous  with  the  life 


132        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

of  the  Eternal  Spirit,  and  tlie  strivings  and  the  beckon- 
ings  of  our  soul  are  simply  the  welling  up  within  us  of 
the  Eternal  Spirit,  Who  is  for  ever  endeavoring  to 
force  up  our  inner  life  to  the  level  of  His  own,  helping 
us  to  shatter  the  bondage  of  sense  and  to  realize  our 
true  ideal.  It  is  the  spiritual  point  of  view  alone  that 
can  reveal  things  as  they  actually  are  to  us,  that  can 
help  us  to  overcome  the  obscurations  and  perversions 
of  sense,  to  appraise  with  unerring  judgment  the  cir- 
cumstances which  surround  and  make  up  our  life.  It  is 
the  fact  that  in  theory  this  view  is  generally  accepted 
by  the  average  man;  it  is  equally  the  fact  that  he  by 
no  means  generally  puts  it  to  the  proof  of  living  by  it. 

The  spiritual  life  must  be  accepted  as  the  negation  of 
the  sense-life,  and  as  a  radical  departure  from  it.  It  is 
too  late  in  the  day  to  propound  naturalistic  explana- 
tions of  the  spiritual  elements  of  our  life;  and,  indeed, 
there  never  was  a  time  when  the  explanations  of  natu- 
ralism were  in  any  way  really  convincing.  The  large 
element  of  hypothesis  and  the  extreme  ingenuity  con- 
tained in  the  attempt  to  make  clear,  say,  the  origin  and 
development  of  the  moral  sense,  discounted  it  heavily 
from  the  start.  We  were  led  back  to  primitive  and 
crude  states  of  society;  we  were  bidden  see  the  moral 
sense  opening  out  in  the  necessity  which  the  most  rudi- 
mentary social  life  demanded  of  a  measure  of  in- 
dividual self-limitation.  The  welfare  of  the  group  de- 
manded certain  modes  of  conduct  and  forbade  others. 
That  was  the  origin  of  the  difference  between  right 
and  wrong.  Natural  selection  did  the  rest,  and  so  we 
have  a  conscience. 

On  this  showing,  of  course,  the  kind  of  authority 
which  conscience  has  always  exercised  is  an  illusion ;  its 


THE  TRUE  SUPERMAN  133 

sole  sanction  is  the  idea  of  social  welfare.  That  is  made 
the  criterion  between  right  and  wrong.  But  if  there  be 
anything  which  every  man  with  a  shred  of  living  con- 
science knows,  it  is  that  when  it  speaks  to  him  it  does 
not  say,  "  This  thing  will  help  or  hinder  the  well-being 
of  society."  What  his  conscience  does  say  is,  "  Thou 
shalt"  or  "Thou  shalt  not  do  this  thing."  When  a  man 
offends  his  conscience  the  momentum  with  which  it  re- 
acts on  him  is  not  to  be  explained  by  ingenious  pictures 
of  primitive  society.  There  is  something  intimate,  per- 
sonal, awful,  ultimate  about  it.  It  seems  to  be  the  echo 
of  a  living  voice  clanging  through  the  crust  of  things 
from  some  remote  hidden  world.  There  are  such  things 
as  social  or  collective  sins ;  but  conscience  does  not  deal 
with  them  on  that  plane.  Guilt  is  an  intensely  individ- 
ual thing ;  and  the  man  who  has  had  a  controversy  with 
his  conscience  knows  that  it  is  the  ambassador  within 
him  not  of  a  certain  social  order  but  of  the  moral  order 
of  the  whole  universe.  The  push,  the  driving  force  be- 
hind it  is  the  ultimate  moral  force  that  invests  the 
whole  scheme  of  things.  It  is  not  the  mere  reverbera- 
tion in  a  man's  soul  of  a  social  order  evolved  by  way  of 
natural  selection.  Conscience  is  native,  elemental, 
primitive.  It  is  impossible  to  get  behind  the  beginning 
of  it.  However  far  back  your  data  may  carry  you,  con- 
science is  there  before  you.  It  is  a  far  more  likely  hy- 
pothesis that  conscience  made  society  possible  than  that 
it  originated  in  the  necessities  of  the  primitive  social 
order.  It  is  no  doubt  true  that  the  necessities  of  the 
growing  social  order  determined  to  a  great  extent  its 
conception  of  the  actual  content  of  the  categories  of 
right  and  wrong;  and  this  conception  has  varied  a  good 
deal  with  the  passing  of  time.   But  the  thing  which  in- 


134        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

vests  wrong  with  wrongness  and  right  with  Tightness, 
and  speaks  in  the  imperative  mood,  is  an  indigenous 
thing  antecedent  to  the  most  primitive  society.  Con- 
science has  to  be  accepted  as  a  genuine,  original  element 
in  the  human  constitution — a  valid,  authentic  thing, 
which  springs  from  and  points  to  an  absolute  Right- 
eousness of  which  it  is  the  embodiment  and  repre- 
sentative within  the  dimensions  of  human  nature. 

The  spiritual  intuitions  of  humanity  stand  in  the 
same  category  as  conscience.  They  are  not  growths 
out  of  the  physical  organism.  They  are  parts  of  a  new 
thing  which  was  superimposed  upon  the  nature — that 
new  thing  which  lifted  man  out  of  the  state  of  mere 
animalism.  And  the  whole  future  development  of  man 
is  destined  to  be  along  this  line.  Nature  is  not  likely, 
so  far  as  we  can  see,  to  produce  a  higher  physical  type 
than  man,;  and  if  there  is  to  be  a  superman,  he  must 
be  evolved  along  the  line  of  the  spiritual  life.  This  is 
analogous  to  the  entire  process  by  which  evolution 
seems  to  have  proceeded.  From  inanimate  matter  to 
life,  from  life  to  conscious  life,  the  movement  pro- 
ceeded by  the  inoculation  of  some  new  element  into 
the  existing  mass  of  things,  by  some  creative  synthesis 
which  inaugurated  a  new  plane  of  development.  Last 
of  all,  in  man  a  new  force  was  introduced  into  the 
process,  and  another  plane  of  development  was 
reached.     That  new  force  was  the  spiritual  life. 

I  am  quite  aware  that  the  scientist  will  scoff  at  this 
detis  ex  machina  interpretation  of  the  evolution 
process;  but  it  nevertheless  does  remain  the  most  rea- 
sonable interpretation  of  all  the  facts.  Indeed,  it  is 
becoming  more  and  more  recognized  that  all  through 
the  world  of  organic  nature  there  is  still  a  creative 


THE  TRUE  SUPERMAN  135 

force  at  work.  M.  Bergson's  "  U Evolution  Crea- 
trice  "  shows  how  deep  and  far-reaching  this  process 
is,  and  it  is  probably  more  in  accord  with  the  present 
scientific  position  to  believe  that  the  spiritual  life  of 
man  originated  in  a  supreme  activity  of  this  creative 
power  than  to  assume  that  it  is  a  variation  produced  by 
natural  processes  within  the  physical  organism. 

It  is  likely  that  we  are  doing  less  than  justice  to 
Nietzsche  to-day  because  we  fasten  too  exclusively  in 
our  estimate  of  him  to  his  worship  of  power.  He  is  re- 
calling us  to  a  real  and  necessary  truth  when  he  re- 
minds us  that  man  has  struggled  up  from  animalism 
and  barbarism  to  his  present  physical  development, 
and  then  asks  if  the  process  is  to  stop  here.  He  pro- 
tests, equally  with  the  religious  thinker,  against  the 
elimination  of  mind  and  will  from  the  universe,  and 
thinks  that  it  is  possible  for  man  to  evolve  out  of  him- 
self, by  the  exercise  of  mind  and  will,  a  type  of  life  as 
much  higher  than  himself  as  he  is  now  higher  than  the 
barbarian  or  the  primate.  He  holds  that  the  possi- 
bilities of  manhood  are  still  unexhausted,  and  that  a 
great  deal  of  development  is  possible  through  "  a  fa- 
vorable accumulation  and  augmentation  of  human 
powers  and  arrangements." 

We  have  no  right  to  quarrel  with  this  position.  It  is 
in  essence  the  New  Testament  position  when  it  speaks 
of  "  the  full-grown  man,  the  measure  of  the  stature  of 
the  fulness  of  Christ."  We  have  not  yet  evolved  the 
highest  type  of  manhood.  But  Nietzsche's  characteris- 
tic ethic  compels  us  to  part  company  with  him.  Despite 
the  anxiety  of  his  disciples  to  deliver  him  from  the  im- 
putation of  condemning  altruism,  the  logical  outcome 
of  the  worship  of  the  will  power  is  the  restoration  of 


136        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

the  ethic  of  the  jungle  and  the  forest  into  human  Hfe, 
and  the  destruction  of  society.  It  is  all  very  well  for 
the  philosopher  to  say  that  he  is  merely  addressing  a 
select  congregation;  but  when  a  man  begins  to  preach 
he  cannot  choose  his  hearers,  and  Nietzsche  forgets 
that  already  the  will  to  power  is  so  awakened  in  the 
mass  of  men  that  the  possibility  of  his  ideal  super-feu- 
dalism has  gone  by  for  ever.  The  number  of  giants  for 
whom  there  is  room  in  this  world,  and  for  whom  there 
is  likely  to  be  room  in  a  world  of  militant  democracy, 
is  very  small  and  is  growing  less ;  and  Nietzsche's  own 
preaching  has  still  further  decreased  it.  For  there  can 
hardly  be  found  a  virile  man  who  does  not  feel  that 
the  call  to  be  a  superman  is  meant  for  him. 

The  very  process  of  history  had  already  made 
Nietzsche's  ethic  a  back  number.  The  growth  of  de- 
mocracy with  its  ideals  of  individual  liberty  and  power, 
and  the  coming  of  brotherhood  with  its  recognition  of 
the  mass-movement  as  an  element  in  human  progress, 
have  placed  irremovable  qualifications  upon  the  will  to 
power.  The  superman  is  to  emerge  not  out  of  the 
resolute  initiative  and  struggle  of  select  individuals, 
but  out  of  the  womb  of  a  continually  ascending  social 
life.   We  must  grow  together  into  supermanhood. 

The  type  of  that  supermanhood  is,  I  think,  already 
revealed  to  us;  but  it  is  enough  that  now  we  should 
recall  that  only  by  the  development  and  advance  of  the 
spiritual  life  in  man  is  it  to  be  achieved.  The  average 
man  in  our  day  is  one  in  whom  the  spirit  is  suppressed 
and  subordinated  to  the  sense-life.  The  true  super- 
man is  he  in  whom  the  spirit  has  overcome  sense,  and 
has  triumphantly  returned  upon  it  and  laid  it  under 
tribute  to  its  own  development. 


XIV 
FROM  FLESH  TO  SPIRIT 

ONE  is  not  bound,  because  one  welcomes 
Nietzsche's  fierce  challenge  to  the  Christian 
ethic,  to  endorse  the  grounds  of  the  challenge. 
It  is  enough  justification  for  welcoming  it  that  the  time 
is  overdue  for  a  radical  re-exploration  of  the  Christian 
ethic,  and  not  the  Christian  ethic  only,  but  the  entire 
Christian  view  of  the  world.  Whether  it  be  from  the 
attrition  of  the  Christian  ideal  by  the  process  of  time, 
or  from  original  misconception,  or  insufficient  appre- 
hension of  its  content,  there  can  be  little  doubt  that 
modern  Christian  practice,  both  religious  and  ethical, 
has  diverged  greatly  from  that  of  the  primitive  Chris- 
tian community.  It  may  be  urged  that  if  there  is  a 
change  it  is  due  to  the  natural  variations  that  are  in- 
evitable in  the  course  of  development ;  but  this  will  not 
bear  examination  in  the  light  of  Christian  history.  All 
great  advances  in  the  course  of  Christian  expansion 
have  been  caused  by  the  recovery  and  reassertion  of 
certain  primitive  elements  of  the  Christian  experience 
and  doctrine ;  and  it  is  hardly  open  to  question  that  the 
general  historical  tendency,  outside  periods  of  refor- 
mation and  revival,  has  been  downward  rather  than 
upward.  The  pressure  of  the  time-spirit  generally 
operates  in  the  direction  of  wearing  down  the  demands 
of  the  Christian  ideal;  and  we  have  so  lowered  the  flag 

137 


138        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

in  our  day,  by  a  process  so  gradual  that  we  have  hardly 
perceived  it — a  process  begun  long  before  we  had  ap- 
peared on  the  scene — that  only  the  historian  could 
elucidate  the  connection  between  current  and  apostolic 
Christianity.  It  is,  consequently,  a  fair  comment  that 
the  hour  has  come  for  a  very  close  scrutiny  of  the 
religious  and  ethical  content  of  modern  Christianity  in 
the  light  of  primitive  Christianity  on  the  one  hand,  and 
of  existing  conditions  on  the  other. 

Perhaps  the  best  evidence  of  the  truth  of  this  criti- 
cism lies  in  the  fact  that  we  do  not  nowadays  antic- 
ipate the  kind  of  change  in  a  man's  life  which  the  early 
Christians  expected  Christianity  to  effect.  The  impact 
of  the  Gospel  on  a  man's  life,  according  to  the  New 
Testament,  precipitated  a  revolution.  It  produced  a 
new  man  who  was  not  at  all  a  revised  version  of  the 
old  man,  but  a  "  new  creation." 

Paul,  in  an  interesting  parenthesis  of  autobiography, 
in  the  Epistle  to  the  Philippians,  gives  a  very  significant 
account  of  the  change  which  his  conversion  wrought  in 
him.  So  far  as  we  expect  Christianity  to  produce  revo- 
lutions in  individual  lives,  we  assume  that  they  will  be 
altogether  ethical  in  character.  Now,  Paul  was  in  no 
sense  a  depraved  person ;  and  it  was  not  the  ethical 
character  of  the  revolution  that  was  wrought  in  him 
that  impressed  him.  It  is  true  that  his  old  pride  was 
killed;  but  the  underlying  and  dominating  fact  in  his 
conversion  was  that  his  scale  of  values  was  turned  up- 
side down. 

Paul  was  out  seeking  what  all  the  world  is  out  to 
seek — the  sense  of  individual  self-fulfilment,  that  com- 
pleteness of  achievement  in  which  a  man  may  rest.  He 
had  been  brought  up  to  believe  that  the  goal  was  to  be 


FROM  FLESH  TO  SPIRIT  139 

reached  by  a  certain  road ;  and  he  set  out  with  a  great 
many  antecedent  advantages.  Birth  and  blood  were  of 
high  account  in  the  scheme  by  which  Paul  had  been 
taught  to  order  his  life ;  he  vaunted  that  he  was  "  cir- 
cumcised the  eighth  day" — no  mere  Ishmaelite  he; 
"  of  the  house  of  Israel,  of  the  tribe  of  Benjamin,  an 
Hebrew  of  the  Hebrews  " — no  man  had  a  better  family 
tree.  "  As  touching  the  law,  a  Pharisee  " — he  had  be- 
longed to  the  most  exclusive  and  powerful  of  the  re- 
ligious sects,  had  been  trained  up  in  it.  "  As  touching 
zeal,  persecuting  the  church  " — no  perfunctory  or  cas- 
ual member  of  this  order  was  this  man,  no  mere  pas- 
senger, but  an  ardent  zealot  demonstrating  his  fervor 
by  a  fury  of  Christian-baiting.  "  As  touching  the 
righteousness  which  is  in  the  law,  found  blameless  " — 
every  little  observance  kept,  every  detail  of  the  com- 
mandments observed,  every  point  of  ritual  and  cere- 
mony strictly  performed.  Here  he  was,  a  man  who 
lacked  nothing — blood,  religious  connections,  personal 
achievements — he  had  everything  he  wanted,  every- 
thing that  could  satisfy  his  craving  and  realize  his 
ambitions. 

But  one  day  he  found  himself  throwing  all  these 
things  on  the  scrap-heap.  He  had  no  further  use  for 
them.  What,  then,  had  happened?  Simply  this — the 
impact  of  Christ  had  turned  his  scale  of  values  upside 
down,  and  these  things  had  slid  off  the  scale  alto- 
gether. Paul  had  come  upon  a  new  life,  and  a  new 
philosophy  of  life.  He  found  himself  a  new  creation, 
a  new  man,  called  and  committed  to  a  way  of  life  as 
different  in  its  interests,  its  outlook,  its  ideals,  as  day 
is  different  from  the  night. 

Paul's  conversion  is  the  classic  instance  of  one  type 


I40        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

of  revolution.  Augustine  and  Francis  of  Assisi  rep- 
resent, respectively,  other  types,  and  the  relative  place 
of  the  various  elements,  ethical,  intellectual,  emotional, 
in  the  revolution  varies  in  each  case.  It  was  not  only 
that  sinners  were  made  saints,  but  that  the  whole  life 
was  reversed;  and  even  the  principle  of  intellectual  and 
aesthetic  judgments  was  entirely  revolutionized.  The 
only  adequate  description  of  the  change  is  that  the 
natural  man  has  become  a  spiritual  man. 

Human  life  is  so  complex  a  thing  that  it  is  not  easy 
to  define  in  a  simple  way  the  precise  character  or  con- 
tent of  the  revolution  which  the  transition  from 
natural  to  spiritual  involves.  It  may,  however,  be 
said,  generally,  to  be  a  transposition  of  the  emphasis 
from  outwardness  to  inwardness. 

Externality  is  the  note  of  the  "  natural  "  life  along 
its  whole  range.  The  natural  man  seeks  his  satisfac- 
tions in  the  concrete  phenomenal  world.  The  pleas- 
ures of  sense,  the  applause  of  the  crowd,  the  acquisi- 
tion and  possession  of  wealth — it  is  in  such  things  as 
these  that  he  seeks  self-realization.  Even  in  the  upper 
reaches  of  his  life  he  is  dominated  by  the  same  bias. 
He  finds  religious  finality  in  concrete  clear-cut  embodi- 
ments of  truth.  He  finds  moral  authority  in  an  ex- 
ternal code.  The  "  natural  "  man  cannot  conceive  of 
a  goodness  save  one  that  is  defined  in  a  set  of  plain  im- 
peratives. A  scale  of  values  determined  by  a  con- 
crete immediacy  of  experience,  traditionalism  in  intel- 
lectual matters,  legalism  in  morality — these  are  the 
working  principles  of  the  natural  man;  and  his  life 
may  be  found  ranging  from  one  of  vicious  sensual 
gratification  to  that  of  most  rigid  orthodoxy  in  belief 
and  of  unbending  pharisaism  in  conduct.     It  is  obvi- 


FROM  FLESH  TO  SPIRIT  141 

ous,  therefore,  that  the  change  which  the  passage  into 
a  spiritual  Hfe  involves  is  not  wholly  appreciated  when 
it  is  regarded  only  as  ethical;  and  it  is  a  real  question 
whether  there  has  not  been  a  considerable  obscuration 
of  all  the  implicates  of  the  spiritual  life  by  the  almost 
exclusive  emphasis  upon  the  moral  change  which  it  in- 
volved. Or  it  may  perhaps  be  that  this  is  due  to  an  in- 
adequate and  partial  principle  of  ethical  judgment,  and 
that  our  definition  of  sin  is  not  comprehensive  enough. 
In  current  evangelism,  conversion  applies  primarily  to 
the  drunkard,  the  thief,  and  the  jail-bird;  and  respect- 
ability is  regarded  as  a  guarantee  that  a  man  is  beyond 
need  of  conversion.  He  himself  certainly  thinks  so. 
Whereas,  indeed,  anything  is  morally  wrong  which 
hinders  the  true  predestined  spiritual  development  of 
man.  We  are  usually  ready  enough  to  pass  a  moral 
judgment  upon  the  Pharisee  without  realizing  that  the 
uncompromisingly  orthodox  person  is  involved  in  the 
same  condemnation.  If  the  legalism  of  the  Pharisee 
was  a  sin,  there  is  also  an  orthodoxy  which  is  sin.  A 
hard-shell  orthodoxy  or  a  severe  legalism  may  hinder 
the  spiritual  life  no  less  than  vice;  and  many  a  man 
needs  to  be  converted  from  a  creed  as  much  as  Paul 
needed  to  be  delivered  from  the  Law,  or  Augustine 
from  sensuality. 

The  New  Testament  antithesis  of  flesh  and  spirit  is 
conceived  in  this  broad  way.  It  is  not  primarily  an 
ethical  antithesis  unless  we  broaden  out  our  conception 
of  moral  evil  to  cover  everything  that  hinders  a  thor- 
oughly spiritual  way  of  life.  Indeed,  Paul  uses  the 
word  "  flesh,"  in  Galatians,*  in  a  way  which  is  far 
separated  from  the  idea  of  vice,  and  shows  that  even 

*iii.  3. 


142        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

the  flesh  may  have  its  own  ethic.  If  T.  H,  Green's 
exposition  of  Romans  viii.  4  is  right,  that  passage  also 
points  to  the  same  conclusion — namely,  that  Paul's 
conception  of  the  flesh  does  not  contain  an  inevitable 
and  inseparable  moral  color.  The  flesh  represents 
generally  the  principles  which  operate  in  the  natural 
man,  whether  with  good  or  evil  intention.  But  Paul 
was  too  keen  an  observer  of  human  nature,  and  too 
sure  a  judge  of  his  own  heart,  not  to  realize  that  the 
natural  man  was  incapable  of  a  satisfying  moral 
achievement,  and  that  he  tended  rather  to  degenerate. 
The  flesh  is  not  necessarily  depraved  and  vicious,  and 
the  natural  man  may  have  high  and  worthy  aims.  But 
he  lives  in  the  bondage  of  the  concrete  and  the  im- 
mediate, and  he  must  be  content  to  become  a  derelict 
or  remain  a  permanent  failure  unless  he  breaks  away 
from  this  bondage  into  the  liberty  and  enlargement 
of  the  spiritual  life. 

It  has  been  said  that  generally  the  change  from 
natural  to  spiritual  is  a  change  from  outwardness  to 
inwardness;  but  this  is  simply  one  instance  in  which 
we  are  compelled  to  use  spatial  metaphors  in  order  to 
describe  something  in  which  space  is  really  no  factor. 
We  are  little  better  off  if  we  say  that  it  means  that  a 
man  turns  his  face  away  from  the  seen  to  the  unseen, 
for  this  only  refers  to  a  quality  and  not  to  the  essence 
of  the  two  opposed  universes.  Similar  defects  belong 
to  any  of  the  antitheses  in  which  the  change  is  de- 
scribed; and  this  same  difficulty  follows  us  into  any 
attempt  to  compare  the  new  hierarchy  of  values  with 
the  old.  For  the  satisfactions  of  the  spiritual  life  are 
things  that  "  break  through  language  and  escape." 
Paul's  friends  might  well  have  said,  when  he  went  on 


FROM  FLESH  TO  SPIRIT  143 

to  describe  the  new  scale  of  values  which  his  conver- 
sion had  brought  him — "  to  be  found  in  Him,"  "  to 
know  Him  and  the  power  of  His  resurrection,"  and  so 
forth — that  these  were  remote  and  unintelligible 
things,  the  mere  sound  of  words.  But  they  were, 
nevertheless,  very  intimate  realities  to  him.  The 
spiritual  man  is  said  to  judge  all  things,  but  even  he  is 
not  said  to  be  able  to  describe  his  inner  experience  in 
speech  which  is  readily  intelligible  to  the  natural  man. 
Nevertheless  there  can  be  no  doubt  in  his  own  mind, 
or  in  the  minds  of  his  friends,  that  when  a  man  has 
passed  from  natural  to  spiritual  a  great  revolution  has 
befallen  him.  That  will  be  perfectly  clear  from  the 
change  in  his  attitude  to  the  things  he  lived  for.  He 
may  have  been  a  lover  of  money;  henceforth  he  ceases 
to  love  money  and  to  live  to  make  it.  At  the  same 
time  it  does  not  follow  that  his  love  of  money  has  been 
displaced  by  a  contempt  of  money.  To  despise  money 
is  as  absurd  as  to  worship  it.  Money  is  an  indis- 
pensable commodity,  and  it  is  only  bad  when  pos- 
session of  it  becomes  an  end  in  life,  or  when  one  has 
too  much  of  it.  What  has  happened  to  the  man  is  that 
he  has  found  a  single  and  sustained  point  of  view  from 
which  he  can  judge  the  value  of  money  and  put  it  in 
its  own  place  in  his  scheme  of  life.  And  not  only 
money,  but  all  other  things  that  the  natural  man  tends 
to  cherish.  Fame,  pleasure,  knowledge,  intellectual 
power — a  man  may  seek  these  to  his  undoing  as  well 
as  wealth.  What  he  needs,  and  what  he  gets  in  his 
new  spiritual  life,  is  a  new  principle  of  evalution,  by 
which  he  is  enabled  to  give  these  things  their  own  place 
and  to  appoint  them  to  their  proper  uses.  The  man 
who  breaks  with  the  natural  way  of  life  finds  his  old 


144        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

gods  tumbling  down  and  settling  about  his  feet;  but 
it  does  not  necessarily  mean  that  he  must  thereupon 
kick  them,  but  simply  that  he  must  put  them  on  those 
minor  pedestals  which  are  proper  to  them. 

Now,  we  do  not  habitually  expect  this  kind  of  rev- 
olution in  a  man's  life  as  a  matter  of  course  when  he 
assumes  Christian  discipleship.  We  have  come  to  re- 
gard the  notion  of  conversion  as  obsolete;  and  we  be- 
lieve that  if  a  man  has  been  brought  up  within  the 
sphere  of  Christian  influences  he  is  beyond  the  need  of 
conversion.  Our  theory  is  that  the  gentle  pressure  of 
Christian  influence  will  sooner  or  later  constrain  the 
youth  into  a  Christian  life.  But  the  poverty  of  our 
current  Christianity  in  the  churches  proves  the  theory 
inadequate.  There  must  be  a  definite,  categorical,  and 
conscious  negation  of  the  natural  and  appropriation  of 
the  spiritual  life  on  the  part  of  every  individual.  Chris- 
tian influences  may  strengthen  the  spiritual  elements  in 
a  man's  life,  and  he  may  make  the  passage  from  the 
natural  to  the  spiritual  without  being  involved  in  a 
great  cataclysm.  The  new  life  must  nevertheless  be- 
gin in  a  definite  act  of  appropriation  of  the  spiritual 
life ;  and  the  person  concerned  must  know  at  the  time 
what  he  is  doing.  Most  men  who  have  embraced  the 
spiritual  life  have  done  so  without  really  understand- 
ing what  it  implies,  without  experiencing  the  tre- 
mendous revolution  which  it  should  be  and  which  they 
ought  to  have  made  it.  The  Salvation  Army  people 
speak  of  one  who  has  been  "  soundly  converted."  The 
trouble  is  that  most  modern  Christians  are  not 
soundly  converted."  I  confess  that  once  I  held 
strongly  to  Horace  Bushnell's  principle  that  one  should 
igrow  up  never  knowing  himself  to  have  been  anything 


FROM  FLESH  TO  SPIRIT  145 

but  a  Christian;  but  that  is,  I  now  see,  subject  to  great 
quahfications.  The  psychology  of  adolescence  seems, 
for  one  thing,  to  make  it  untenable ;  and  I  hold  that  it 
should  be  an  element  in  Christian  education  to  empha- 
size the  need  of  conversion,  and  especially  to  make  clear 
all  that  conversion  means.  Most  of  us  have  not  said  a 
final  irrevocable  farewell  to  the  flesh,  to  materialistic 
views  and  ways  of  life,  and  consequently  our  Christian 
life  is  a  weak  patchwork  in  two  colors.  We  have  tried 
to  build  the  Christian  life  into  the  walls  of  the  old  life, 
and  have  in  consequence  only  jerry-built  it.  It  does  not 
stand  the  storms  of  life,  neither  does  it  give  us  real 
covert  in  the  tempest  or  shade  from  the  heat.  It  is  a 
poor,  mediocre  thing,  because  we  set  out  upon  it  in  ig- 
norance of  what  was  involved  in  making  it  a  splendid 
majestic  reality.  This  was,  of  course,  primarily  a  de- 
fect of  education.  We  were  permitted  to  start  building 
the  tower  without  counting  the  cost.  We  are  reaping 
the  poor  harvest  which  has  grown  out  of  the  bad  hus- 
bandry of  those  who  set  us  out  in  the  spiritual  life. 

It  is  necessary  that  we  should  realize  that  the  call  of 
the  Gospel  is  not  a  call  to  a  life  which  is  an  improve- 
ment upon  the  life  of  the  ordinary  person,  or  a  call  to 
cultivate  a  little  religion;  it  is  specifically  a  call  to  a 
different  kind  of  life,  with  different  aims,  different 
ideals,  different  values,  and  a  diametrically  opposite 
direction.  The  call  of  the  Gospel  is  an  invitation  to  a 
way  of  life  which  begins  in  a  revolution.  It  does  not 
ask  us  to  add  one  more  to  the  interests  that  make  up 
our  life,  to  put  a  new  iron  In  the  fire,  to  add  religion 
to  our  business  and  pleasure.  It  calls  upon  a  man  to 
reorganize  and  reconstruct  his  life  from  an  entirely 
different  point  of  view,  to  take  his  stand  above  this 


146        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

world  of  concrete  sensible  experience,  this  world  of 
eating  and  drinking,  sleeping  and  waking,  and  to  re- 
arrange his  interests  and  preoccupations  from  the  new 
standpoint.  It  asks  that  this  new  point  of  view  shall 
underlie  and  determine  all  other  points  of  view.  There 
are  circumstances  which  have  to  be  contemplated  from 
the  standpoint  of  the  home,  of  business,  or  of  friend- 
ship; but  this  spiritual  point  of  view  is  to  subsume  all 
others,  determine  their  mode  of  action,  give  them  its 
own  particular  color,  shooting  its  own  light  through 
them  all. 

The  passage  into  a  spiritual  life,  as  the  New  Testa- 
ment regards  it,  is  a  change  of  universe.  It  is  from 
the  universe  of  the  seen  and  temporal  to  that  of  the 
unseen  and  eternal.  We  have  spoken  of  it  already 
as  a  change  from  outwardness  to  inwardness,  and  have 
admitted  the  inadequacy  of  this  description.  It  may 
be  that  the  proper  account  of  the  process  should  be 
from  one  kind  of  outwardness  to  another.  The  per- 
son involved  translates  himself  from  one  kind  of  world 
into  another.  The  appropriateness  of  the  word  "  in- 
wardness "  in  this  connection  lies  in  the  fact  that  one 
relates  oneself  to  the  new  universe  by  means  of  intui- 
tions and  instincts  and  processes  which  are  exclusively 
personal  and  individual,  and  are  not  amenable  to  ob- 
servation nor  contingent  upon  any  external  conditions. 
The  whole  affair  is  transacted  within  the  area  of  the 
individual  consciousness.  It  is  a  highly  and  ex- 
clusively private  process. 

The  process  is  twofold.  First,  it  has  a  negative 
aspect  which  in  the  New  Testament  is  defined  as  re- 
pentance. It  is  a  commonplace  of  religious  thinking 
that  repentance  means  more  than  a  condition  of  con- 


FROM  FLESH  TO  SPIRIT  147 

triteness  and  penitence.  "  Repentance,"  says  Du  Bose, 
*'  is  the  personal  negation  of  sin.  It  is  the  entire  op- 
position of  our  entire  selves  to  sin.  In  the  first  place, 
what  is  our  entire  selves  ?  The  attitude  required  is  not 
one  of  mind  only;  it  must  be  equally  of  the  heart  and 
of  the  feelings  or  affections.  Nor  is  that  enough.  It 
must  be  of  the  will  and  of  the  effectual  will."  *  This 
definition  is  satisfactory  when  sin  is  defined  compre- 
hensively enough  to  include  all  that  hinders  the  awak- 
ening and  development  of  the  spiritual  life.  It  is  not 
merely  an  ethical  process  in  the  narrower  sense.  It  is 
a  complete  opposition  to  the  "  natural  "  life  in  all  its 
phases. 

The  positive  side  of  the  process  is  faith ;  and  faith, 
according  to  Du  Bose,  is  "  the  personal  affirmation  of 
God  or  of  holiness.  It  is  the  entire  setting  of  the  entire 
self  God-ward,  or  holiness-ward."  Here,  again,  the 
definition  must  be  accepted  with  the  proviso  that  holi- 
ness is  regarded  broadly  as  the  converse  of  sin  in  the 
sense  in  which  it  has  just  been  spoken  of.  The  defini- 
tion is  far  more  satisfactory  with  the  reference  to  holi- 
ness left  out  altogether.  Faith  is  an  attitude  to  God 
— to  the  spiritual  universe,  if  you  will;  but  the 
"  spiritual  universe  "  is,  after  all,  only  a  thin  way  of 
describing  God.  Repentance  and  faith  are  the  obverse 
and  the  reverse  of  the  same  orientation  process.  They 
are  the  negative  and  positive  movements  in  the  same 
personal  episode;  but  they  are  both  movements  which 
embrace  the  entire  life  through  and  through. 

This  act  is  not  to  be  regarded  as  being  done  once 
for  all,  nor  as  an  act  which  fixes  unchangeably  the 
"  set  "  of  the  life  thereafter,  confirming  it  in  one  given 
*"  The  Gospel  in  the  Gospels,"  pp.  148-9. 


148        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

groove.  It  is  merely  the  initial  act  of  a  permanent 
activity.  "  By  repentance,"  said  Luther  in  the  first  of 
his  Wittenberg  theses,  "  we  are  to  understand  that  the 
whole  life  of  Christians  should  be  a  repentance." 
Similarly,  the  whole  life  of  Christians  is  to  be  a  life 
of  active  operative  faith.  As  time  passes,  the  negative 
element  in  the  experience  may  lose  its  immediacy  in 
the  positive  activity  and  habit  of  faith,  but  it  all 
along  entails  a  protest  against  and  a  negation  of  the 
"  natural." 

May  it  not  be  said  that  faith  is  the  characteristic 
exercise  of  the  spiritual  life  in  man,  just  as  reasoning, 
feeling,  willing,  are  the  characteristic  activities  of  other 
faculties?  Eucken  speaks  of  the  religious  faculty  as 
one  among  other  faculties  which  may  be  vitalized  by 
the  emergence  of  the  active  spiritual  life.  Religion 
stands  in  his  scheme  with  art  and  conduct  as  a  depart- 
ment of  human  interest  and  activity.  But,  unless  we 
are  going  to  be  very  fastidious  in  our  use  of  language, 
it  seems  difficult  to  draw  a  just  distinction  between  the 
religious  faculty  and  that  potential  spiritual  life  which 
may  by  repentance  and  faith  become  actual  and  su- 
preme in  our  experience.  Is  it  not  rather  the  truth 
that  the  religious  faculty  subsumes  all  the  rest,  and  that 
they  become  vital  and  dynamic  when  the  exercise  of 
the  religious  faculty  mediates  to  them  inspiration  and 
strength?  It  is  surely  beyond  cavil  that  the  highest 
achievements  in  art  and  morality  (the  two  departments 
in  which  we  measure  human  advance  with  the  greatest 
assurance)  have  been  religiously  inspired.  The  sculp- 
ture of  Greece,  the  ethic  of  the  Hebrew  prophets,  the 
painting  of  the  Renascence,  the  most  permanently  vital 
music  in  all  time,  the  civic  passion  of  a  Savonarola,  the 


FROM  FLESH  TO  SPIRIT  149 

political  idealism  of  a  Mazzini,  the  humanitarianism  of 
a  Wilberforce,  have  all  alike  had  a  religious  inspira- 
tion. Is  it  not  simpler  to  say  that  our  capacity  and 
power  for  what  we  call  religion  is  identical  with  the 
latent  germinal  spirituality  which,  when  it  is  liberated 
and  asserted,  issues  into  a  thoroughgoing  and  effectual 
spiritual  life?  By  the  pragmatic  test,  the  distinction 
between  religious  and  spiritual  is  surely  invalid.  For 
there  is  assuredly  no  religious  exercise  worthy  the 
name  which  does  not  establish  a  real  and  actual  con- 
tact between  the  soul  and  that  spiritual  universe  from 
which  its  growth  and  movement  derive,  and  in  which 
Eucken  finds  the  secret  of  our  self-realization. 

It  is  too  late  in  the  day  for  naturalism  to  invite  us 
to  believe  that  the  religious  instinct  is  a  morbid  de- 
velopment out  of  the  breakdown  of  some  purely  ani- 
mal tendency,  a  mental  fungus  growing  on  a  diseased 
and  exhausted  soil.  The  common  man  is  beginning 
to  see  that  even  naturalism  cannot  do  business  with- 
out the  help  of  faith.  For  naturalism  must  in  the 
course  of  its  work  sometimes  proceed  from  the  known 
to  the  unknown.  The  scientist  never  makes  an  ex- 
periment on  the  basis  of  a  given  postulate  or  hy- 
pothesis without  exercising  a  real  faith.  Life  itself 
would  become  altogether  impossible  without  some 
"  speculating  in  futures,"  which  means  that  human 
life,  even  on  the  very  lowest  plane,  never  ceases  in 
some  sense  to  be  a  religious  affair,  a  dealing  with  the 
unknown.  But  in  the  natural  man  this  power  of  faith  is 
so  hedged  in  by  sense  that  it  never  exercises  itself  be- 
yond a  certain  range  of  immediacies — such  as  the  reg- 
ularity of  the  physical  order,  and  the  innate  (but  quite 
unreasoned)  sense  of  the  general  friendliness  of  the 


ISO        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

environing  universe.  These  are  the  things  we  trust  in 
all  the  ventures  of  our  life.  What  the  breach  with 
sense  does  is  to  set  this  power  of  faith  free,  to  deliver 
it  from  the  oppression  of  the  obvious,  and  to  allow  it 
to  reach  out  until  it  lays  hold  of  the  unseen  whole,  the 
universal  spiritual  life,  the  life  of  God.  That  po- 
tential and  dormant  continuity  with  the  Universal 
Spirit  is  by  this  emancipation  and  activity  of  faith 
actualized,  vitalized.  The  spiritual  life  becomes  the 
characteristic  note,  faith  the  characteristic  habit  of 
the  whole  man. 

But  Faith  becomes  not  a  habit,  an  orientation  of 
life  only,  it  becomes  also  an  organ  of  knowledge. 
Where  ratiocination  breaks  down,  faith  carries  on  the 
tale.  We  begin  to  believe  "  where  we  cannot  prove." 
Faith  establishes  a  new  point  of  view,  a  new  mode  of 
approach  to  our  problems,  a  new  experience  and  a  new 
interpretation  of  experience.  It  brings  us  at  last  all 
the  way  to  such  reality  as  our  finitude  can  apprehend. 
It  is  at  once  a  "  set  "  of  the  soul,  an  activity  of  the 
will,  a  power  of  vision,  and  an  instrument  of  knowl- 
edge. It  is  that  power  by  which  at  every  stage  of  life 
we  pass  from  the  known  to  the  unknown,  from  a  life 
in  the  part  to  a  life  in  the  whole.  It  is  at  once  the 
initial  act  and  the  permanent  activity  by  which  we  ap- 
propriate for  ourselves  the  divine  life. 


XV 
THE  UNIVERSE  OF  SPIRIT 

IT  is,  of  course,  obvious  that  the  very  fact  of  per- 
sonal intercourse  entails  the  existence  of  some 
kind  of  continuity  between  man  and  man.  What 
this  continuity  is  we  cannot  say.  The  conception  of 
personality  is  to-day  once  more  in  a  fluid  state,  and  we 
are  as  far  away  as  ever  from  anything  like  a  convinc- 
ing account  of  the  nature  and  content  of  the  impact  of 
one  personality  upon  another.  But  that  there  is  some 
spiritual  aura  which  pervades  all  humanity  is  an  ir- 
resistible inference  from  the  fact  that  men  do  affect 
one  another  in  a  multitude  of  ways.  If  personality  were 
a  walled  and  gateless  city,  society  and  fellowship  would 
be  impossible  beyond  the  very  narrowest  limits.  It  is 
one  of  the  commonest  experiences  of  thinking  men  that 
there  are  times  of  intellectual  contagion  which  is  to  all 
seeming  independent  of  any  conscious  personal  con- 
tact, when  they  come  upon  thoughts  in  other  men's 
minds  which  have  emerged  also  in  their  own.  We  say 
sometimes  that  certain  ideas,  certain  tendencies  of 
thought,  are  "  in  the  air."  There  are  also  moments 
of  social  emotion  when  we  come,  as  Dora  Greenwell 
says,  "  within  the  influences  of  the  broad  tendencies  of 
humanity,  where  individual  limitations  disappear, 
swept  away  by  the  force  of  the  current."  "  In  con- 
templating men,"  she  adds,  "  say  soldiers,  weavers,  col- 


152        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

Hers,  in  a  collective  body,  we  feel  the  heart  drawn  out 
in  a  deepened  sympathy  and  interest,  which  none 
among  them  perhaps  as  individuals  would  com- 
mand." *  And  yet,  while  we  are  conscious  of  our  con- 
tinuity with  the  great  ocean  of  human  life,  we  are  also 
able  to  set  ourselves  over  against  it  as  distinct  per- 
sonal integers.  We  do  so  in  the  very  act  of  recogniz- 
ing its  existence. 

We  may  discover  this  continuity  also  in  history. 
The  course  of  historical  events  is  the  outward  and  vis- 
ible sign  of  the  operation  of  certain  hidden  forces.  The 
sequence  of  circumstances  which  makes  up  any  given 
historical  episode  has  been  determined  by  the  action 
and  reaction  of  living  principles.  To  appreciate  the 
meaning  of  history  it  is  our  first  duty,  having  all  the 
relevant  data  before  us,  to  find  out  what  principles 
have  determined  the  course  of  events  at  various  stages 
in  human  affairs.  We  shall  naturally  discover  these 
principles  in  forms  which  are  largely  due  to  local  and 
temporary  conditions;  but  if  we  proceed  to  dig  deeper 
and  disentangle  these  principles  from  what  is  local  and 
accidental,  we  shall  come  upon  an  underlying  spirit 
from  which  they  have  issued,  and  to  which  they  appear, 
in  their  original  purity,  to  belong  as  permanent  and 
abiding  activities.  Beneath  the  outer  flux  of  human 
life,  there  is  an  immanent  spirit  in  which  we  are  to 
discover  the  source  of  historical  movements,  a  spirit 
which  has  by  its  characteristic  activities  so  determined 
the  course  of  history  that  it  is  the  commonest  of  all 
commonplaces  that  "  history  repeats  itself." 

Take  such  an  episode  as  the  Protestant  Reforma- 
tion. What  the  Reformers  stood  for,  and  what  there- 
*  "  Two  Friends,"  p.  73. 


THE  UNIVERSE  OF  SPIRIT  153 

fore  evoked  the  Reformation  and  determined  its  char- 
acter, was  the  theological  principle  of  Justification  by 
Faith.  It  was  not  the  first  time  that  this  same  principle 
had  expressed  itself  in  a  movement.  It  lay  at  the  root 
of  St.  Paul's  break  with  Judaism,  and  that  period  of 
apostolic  history  is  wholly  colored  by  it.  It  is  not  dif- 
ficult to  indicate  the  local  and  temporary  conditions 
which,  in  either  case,  determined  the  particular  form 
of  the  principle;  but  if  we  look  beneath  the  form,  what 
we  assuredly  come  upon  is  the  immanent  spirit  of  man 
struggling  to  be  free,  fighting  its  age-long  battle 
against  the  tyranny  of  institutions  that  had  outlived 
their  office,  marching  on  to  what  it  knows  to  be  its 
destiny  of  perfect  freedom.  Mazzini  used  to  say  that 
the  French  Revolution  was  but  the  political  translation 
of  the  Protestant  Reformation ;  and  beneath  the  welter 
of  the  French  Revolution,  despite  its  excesses  and  con- 
tradictions, the  historical  student  discovers  the  imma- 
nent human  spirit  in  another  of  its  great  uprisings  and 
endeavors  to  lay  hold  of  its  predestined  liberty.  It  is, 
perhaps,  true  that  for  the  moment  the  real  inwardness 
of  the  French  Revolution  was  obscured  and  its  true 
end  defeated  by  reason  of  its  excesses,  but  it  was  nev- 
ertheless the  mainspring  and  origin  of  the  nineteenth- 
century  struggles  for  political  and  religious  freedom 
in  England.  In  the  Renaissance  also  the  human  spirit 
is  seen  breaking  away  from  the  bondage  of  tradition 
in  the  realm  of  knowledge  and  rising  up  in  its  might 
to  claim  its  rightful  heritage  of  light.  It  is  this  power 
of  dynamic  eruption  which  the  immanent  spirit  of 
humanity  possesses  that  explains  all  the  renewals  and 
revivals,  all  the  splendid  leaps- forward  of  the  race 
with  which  the  course  of  history  is  punctuated. 


154        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

It  is  significant  that  the  early  stages  of  all  such 
movements  appear  as  revolts,  as  breaches  with  the  past. 
It  is  the  tendency  of  human  nature  to  embody  its  spir- 
itual conquests  in  institutions  and  then  gradually  to 
ascribe  permanent  validity  to  the  institutions.  But  all 
formal  and  institutional  embodiments  of  spiritual  prin- 
ciples are,  for  this  reason,  foredoomed  sooner  or  later 
to  a  confliict  with  the  living  spirit  out  of  which  in  the 
first  instance  they  sprang.  Time  makes  institutions 
very  inelastic  and  brittle;  and  the  ever-new  wine  of  the 
abiding  spirit  of  man  requires  ever-new  skins  for  its 
accommodation.  The  course  of  history  may  be  re- 
garded as  the  ceaseless  conflict — with  fluctuating  for- 
tunes— between  the  native  tendency  of  flesh  and  blood 
to  cling  to  its  formal  institutions,  and  the  latent  spir- 
ituality of  man  which  will  not  be  for  ever  bound  by 
any  institution.  Soon  or  late,  it  breaks  through  the 
old  and  embodies  itself  in  new  forms  more  adapted 
to  and  consistent  with  the  conditions  of  a  new  age. 

Now,  the  emergence  of  a  triumphant  spiritual  life 
in  the  individual  is  marked  by  a  clear  sense  of  its  con- 
tinuity with  this  universal  and  immanent  human  spirit. 
It  is  recognized  as  being  definitely  grounded  and  estab- 
lished in  a  whole,  and  in  experience  this  whole  is  not 
distinguishable  from  God.  It  is  impossible  to  delimit 
the  boundary  which  marks  off  the  divine  from  the  hu- 
man ;  and  it  is  impossible  to  distinguish  this  immanent 
human  spirit  from  the  fact  which  is  covered  by  the 
doctrine  of  Divine  Immanence.  The  immanent  spirit 
of  man  is  the  immanent  Spirit  of  God.  This  Spirit  is 
atomised,  if  the  term  may  be  used,  in  human  personal- 
ity, yet  it  is  all  along  continuous  with  the  Universal 
Spirit.     Whatever  spiritual  life  we  possess,  it  is  the 


THE  UNIVERSE  OF  SPIRIT  155 

life  of  God  in  us.  For  always  "  it  is  God  that  worketh 
in  us  both  to  will  and  to  work,  for  His  good  pleasure." 
Perhaps  there  is  a  danger  to-day  of  such  an  emphasis 
upon  the  Divine  Immanence  as  to  involve  the  practical 
exclusion  of  the  correlative  fact  of  God's  Transcend- 
ence. If  we  are  to  save  ourselves  from  pantheism,  with 
all  its  implied  fatalism,  we  must  insist  upon  the  Tran- 
scendence of  God;  just  as,  if  we  are  to  be  delivered 
from  the  sterility  of  deism,  we  must  emphasize  the  Di- 
vine Immanence.  We  may,  moreover,  almost  lay  it 
down  as  a  law  that  the  ethical  failure  of  most  religious 
systems  is  to  be  traced  to  the  neglect  of  one  or  other  of 
these  complementary  conceptions.  To  the  Jew  God 
was  transcendent  only,*  at  least  until  the  pressure  of 
Greek  ideas  began  to  suggest  the  notion  of  imma- 
nence. The  consequences  were  twofold.  First,  a  very 
keen  sense  of  personal  identity,  a  consciousness  of 
sharp,  clear-cut  outlines  of  personality,  and  with  this  a 
very  profound  sense  of  theological  sin — "  Against 
Thee,  Thee  only,  have  I  sinned."  Secondly,  a  very 
secondary  sense  of  the  social  moralities.  From  this 
there  followed  an  exclusive  concentration  upon  reli- 
gious exercises,  a  process  which  exerted  no  moral  disci- 
pline and  produced  no  moral  energy.  This  was  the 
perpetual  indictment  of  the  national  religion  on  the 
lips  of  the  Hebrew  prophets.  Mohammedanism, 
equally  and  for  the  same  fundamental  reason,  has  de- 
veloped a  fierce  religious  consciousness,  but  a  very 
inadequate  sense  of  moral  obligation;  and  the  ethical 
emphasis  which  modern  Mohammedanism  is  develop- 

*  It  is  true  that  occasionally  the  Jew  saw  a  glimpse  of  the  fuller 
truth;  e.  g.  "  The  Word  is  very  nigh  unto  thee,  in  thy  mouth  and 
in  thy  heart." 


156        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

ing  is  bound  in  time  to  modify  its  theological  precon- 
ceptions very  profoundly.  On  the  other  hand,  Stoicism 
with  the  emphasis  exclusively  on  immanence,  despite 
its  recognition  of  the  moral  Ego  as  the  pivot  of  its  en- 
tire problem,  never  became  anything  more  than  a  spec- 
ulative philosophy,  because  it  failed  to  leave  its  Ego 
free.  It  is  necessary,  therefore,  while  we  emphasize 
the  Divine  Immanence,  that  we  should  preserve  our 
sense  of  the  Divine  Transcendence.  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  the  spiritual  life  compels  us  to  do  so.  For,  para- 
dox though  it  may  seem,  it  is  nevertheless  true  that,  to- 
gether with  the  keen  sense  of  continuity  with  a  uni- 
versal spiritual  life,  the  coming  of  the  spiritual  life  to 
the  individual  brings  with  it  an  altogether  new  experi- 
ence of  one's  own  personal  integrity  and  freedom. 
Unless  this  is  wholly  illusory,  it  must  correspond  to  the 
fact  of  the  Divine  Transcendence,  just  as  the  sense 
of  continuity  with  a  universal  spirit  points  to  the  fact 
of  the  Divine  Immanence. 

The  contradiction  between  the  conceptions  of  Imma- 
nence and  Transcendence  as  they  refer  to  God  is 
largely  superficial  and  verbal.  To  a  stern,  unbending 
logic  they  are  mutually  exclusive  and  therefore  irrecon- 
cilable. But  it  is  only  when  logic  runs  amok  that  this 
situation  actually  arises.  To  common  sense  and  to  ex- 
perience, the  two  conceptions  are  not  merely  comple- 
mentary, but  mutually  interpretative.  They  are  ac- 
cepted as  two  correlative  facts  of  personal  experience 
— the  sense  of  personal  identity  and  the  consciousness 
of  continuity  with  a  spiritual  life  which  is  universal. 
It  is  only  a  God  Who  is  at  once  transcendent  and  im- 
manent Who  will  fit  in  with  the  demands  of  our  spir- 
itual experience.  When  we  speak  of  the  universal  spir- 


THE  UNIVERSE  OF  SPIRIT  157 

itual  life  we  are  speaking  of  the  Immanence  of  the 
transcendent  God.  When  we  recognize  an  independent 
spiritual  life  in  ourselves  we  are  conceding  the  Tran- 
scendence of  the  immanent  God.  In  our  experience  of 
the  spiritual  life  as  at  once  independent  and  yet  con- 
tinuous with  a  universal  spiritual  life,  we  do  actually 
overcome  in  experience  what  is  in  a  word  an  irrecon- 
cilable opposition. 

There  is  a  passage  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Galatians 
which  supplies  us  with  the  precise  analogy  of  this  posi- 
tion. The  apparent  paradox  implied  in  the  sense  of 
continuity  with  a  universal  spiritual  life  on  the  one 
hand,  and  of  our  own  independent  spiritual  life  on  the 
other,  is  paralleled  by  Paul's  words,  "  I  live,  yet  not  I, 
but  Christ  liveth  in  me."  Paul  says  that  he  was  cruci- 
fied with  Christ,  and  whatever  else  that  may  mean  we 
must  connect  it  with  the  expression,  "  The  death  that 
He  died,  He  died  unto  sin  once,"  and  assume  that  Paul 
meant  that  he  also  had  died  to  sin,  had  repudiated  the 
life  of  the  flesh.  "  Yet  I  live — nevertheless  not  I,  but 
Christ  in  me."  Here  we  have  the  strong  assertion  of 
personal  self-hood  side  by  side  with  a  no  less  strong 
assertion  of  the  merging  of  it  in  that  of  Christ. 
"  God,"  says  Paul  elsewhere,  "  sends  forth  the  spirit 
of  His  Son  into  our  hearts."  The  repudiation  of  the 
sense-life,  of  the  natural,  means  the  invasion  and  the 
interpenetration  of  us  by  the  spirit  of  Christ,  Who  ab- 
sorbs and  assimilates  our  spirits  into  His,  and  yet  by 
some  transcendent  miracle  leaves  us  not  less,  but  more 
— and  more  gloriously — our  own  selves. 

No  view  of  the  world  is  likely  to  survive  many  days 
which  does  not  regard  human  freedom  as  axiomatic, 
and  no  accumulation  of  argument  will  prevail  against 


158        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

the  inlaid  conviction  of  the  ordinary  person  that  he  is 
a  free  agent.  It  is,  no  doubt,  true  that  most  people 
speak  occasionally  in  the  language  of  necessarianism, 
or  at  least  concede  some  degree  of  predestination  in  the 
affairs  of  life;  but  side  by  side  with  this,  and  appar- 
ently without  much  concern  for  the  logical  incongruity 
involved,  there  is  invariably  a  profound  belief  in 
freedom. 

But  the  freedom  of  man  implies  the  freedom  of 
God ;  and  there  is,  perhaps,  no  aspect  of  God  which  has 
been  so  completely  obscured  as  this.  The  doctrine  of 
Divine  Immanence  has  been  of  enormous  assistance  in 
enabling  men  to  preserve  their  hold  of  God ;  but  it  has 
involved  the  sacrifice  of  the  conception  of  the  divine 
freedom.  It  is  not  quite  easy  to  analyze  the  frame  of 
mind  which  the  pressure  of  scientific  thought  has  pro- 
duced in  this  direction.  Either  it  has  compelled  us  to 
identify  God  with  the  energy  which  is  operative  in  the 
universe,  and  we  have  only  been  saved  from  pantheism 
by  speaking  of  immanence;  nevertheless  the  immanent 
God  is  a  God  in  chains,  a  God  contained  in  His  own 
laws.  Or  it  has  driven  us  (and  this  is  the  case  of  most 
people)  to  a  kind  of  deism  which  regards  God  as 
operating  by  unchanging  processes  from  which  there 
can  be  no  departure  or  appeal.  This  is  why  we  have 
ceased  to  believe  in  miracle  and  prayer.  We  have 
come  to  think  that  God  has  subordinated  His  freedom 
to  His  laws,  that  in  the  government  of  the  universe  He 
has  abdicated  in  favor  of  the  machinery  which  He  cre- 
ated. But  whether  we  have  tended  to  pantheism  or  de- 
ism, we  have  ceased  to  believe  in  the  freedom  of  God. 

At  the  present  time,  however,  we  are  being  delivered 
from  this  heresy  by  the  appearance  of  two  tendencies. 


THE  UNIVERSE  OF  SPIRIT  159 

The  one  is  that  represented  by  M.  Bergson  in  his 
"  L'Evolution  Creatrice,"  in  which  he  impugns  the 
doctrine  of  the  immutability  of  natural  law  and  points 
to  facts  which  compel  the  inference  that  there  is  a  free 
creative  energy  in  nature,  which  means  that  God  im- 
manent operates  beyond  and  above  His  own  laws.  On 
the  other  hand  we  have  the  emphasis  upon  the  apoca- 
lyptic elements  in  the  teaching  of  Jesus  which  is  com- 
pelling us  to  relate  God  transcendent  once  more  to  the 
course  of  human  affairs.  There  are  certain  critical 
questions  connected  with  the  Gospel  apocalyptic  which 
are  still  outstanding;  but  though  we  are  enabled  to 
eliminate  the  machinery  of  portent  and  prodigy  from 
the  apocalyptic  sections  of  the  Gospel  record,  by  trac- 
ing them  to  their  undoubted  literary  ancestry  in  Jewish 
apocalyptic  writings,  and  regarding  them  as  additions 
to  the  original  Christian  records,  it  is  impossible  to 
deny  the  existence  of  genuine  apocalyptic  elements  in 
the  teaching  of  Jesus.  The  essence  of  Apocalyptic  is, 
to  quote  Professor  John  Oman,  "  the  conviction  that 
the  true  divine  order  is  ever  ready  to  break  into  the 
world  if  men  will  only  suffer  it  to  break  into  their 
hearts."  God  has  two  orders  of  history,  a  lower  and  a 
higher.  The  higher  order  may  under  certain  condi- 
tions break  across  the  lower  order  and  confound  the 
best-laid  anticipations  of  the  historian.  But  this  view 
constrains  us  to  a  belief  in  a  God  Who  has  not  sur- 
rendered His  sovereignty  to  His  machinery. 

God  has  made  us  free,  but  there  would  be  no  mean- 
ing in  the  gift  if  He  had  repudiated  His  own  freedom. 
Nor  would  there  be  meaning  in  His  freedom  had  He 
not  also  made  us  free.  For  it  is  this  postulate  of  free- 
dom which  makes  it  permissible  for  us  to  conceive  of 


i6o        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

genuine  spontaneous  intercourse  with  God  as  a  real 
possibility.  An  isolated  God  is  unthinkable;  and  the 
intercourse  of  automata  is  an  absurdity.  But  there  is 
more  than  this  involved.  It  becomes  perilous  to  speak 
of  laws  in  connection  with  history ;  or  at  least  it  makes 
the  inferior  order  of  history  liable  at  any  time  to  be 
disturbed  by  the  interaction  of  the  free  will  of  man 
and  the  free  will  of  God.  The  postulate  of  freedom 
introduces  an  endless  range  of  unknown  quantities, 
and  the  most  careful  antecedent  calculations  may  be 
stultified  by  the  event.  Where  God  and  man  meet  in 
intimacy  one  never  knows  what  may  happen.  It  is 
this  belief  that  underlies  the  apocalyptic  hope;  and 
the  recovery  of  this  belief  carries  with  it  a  restoration 
of  faith  in  the  genuine  possibility  of  miracles  and  the 
validity  of  the  belief  in  prayer. 

Anything  which  helps  us  to  recover  our  faith  in 
prayer  will  add  enormously  to  the  possibilities  of  life. 
We  have  largely  lost  the  sense  of  the  reality  of 
prayer;  and  it  hardly  amounts  to  anything  more  than 
a  process  of  auto-suggestion,  a  spiritual  gymnastic 
which  does  not  do  what  we  intend  it  to  do,  but  does  us 
good  all  the  same.  Unless  prayer  achieves  the  end 
which  is  expressly  sought  in  it,  through  the  agency  of 
Him  to  Whom  it  is  addressed, — if  it  is  an  absurd  and 
gratuitous  illusion  all  the  time, — then  the  sooner  we 
drop  it  the  better.  But  the  signs  point  rather  to  a 
rehabilitation  of  the  practice  of  prayer. 

William  James,  in  one  of  his  conclusions  in  the 
"Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,"  says  that  "prayer 
is  a  process  wherein  work  is  really  done,  and  spiritual 
energy  flows  in  and  produces  effects  psychological 
and  material,  within  the  phenomenal  world."     This 


THE  UNIVERSE  OF  SPIRIT  i6i 

certainly  does  not  carry  us  very  far;  it  merely  tells 
us  that  our  prayers  are  something  more  than  a 
process  of  auto-suggestion;  that  they  are  real  causes 
producing  real  effects.  It  is  only  when  we  consider 
the  relation  of  man  to  the  spiritual  world  that  we  can 
really  see  the  inwardness  of  prayer.  There  are  two 
phrases  by  Pascal  which  are  worth  recalling — "  Thou 
wouldst  not  be  seeking  Me  hadst  thou  not  already 
found  Me  " ;  "  Thou  wouldst  not  seek  Me  if  thou  didst 
not  possess  Me."  The  roots  of  prayer  are  in  the  di- 
vine indwelling;  and  a  good  deal  of  scepticism  regard- 
ing prayer  has  arisen  from  a  misapprehension  of  the 
course  of  the  interchange  between  God  and  ourselves. 
Prayer  is  our  response  to  a  divine  impulse.  Our 
prayers  are  our  answers  to  God.  It  is  not  we  who  by 
our  prayers  set  the  machinery  of  the  spiritual  world  in 
motion;  our  prayers  are  but  a  part  of  a  movement 
which  began  with  God — a  part  of  the  process  whereby 

That  which  drew  from  out  the  boundless  deep 
Turns  again  home. 

Does  not  this  explain  certain  perplexing  scriptures? 
"Before  they  call,  I  will  answer;  and  while  they  are 
yet  speaking,  I  will  hear."  "  All  things  whatsoever  ye 
pray  and  ask  for,  believe  that  ye  have  received  them, 
and  ye  shall  have  them."  The  giving  precedes  the 
praying.  The  prayer  is  the  appropriation  of  the  gift. 
Nevertheless  the  prayer  is  not  an  automatic  or  me- 
chanical reaction,  but,  by  reason  of  human  freedom,  a 
spontaneous  approach  to  God.  We  may  regard  prayer 
as  the  effort  and  the  pressure  of  the  spiritual  life 
within  us  seeking  to  rise  to  its  true  level.  But,  on  the 
other  hand,  because  of  the  real  integrity  of  the  in- 


i62        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

dividual  personality,  we  may  regard  it  also  as  a  free 
and  voluntary  reaching  out  of  the  soul  to  God. 

The  proper  view  of  prayer  is  that  it  belongs  to  the 
divine  purpose  and  process  of  self- fulfilment,  and  be- 
cause he  who, prays  and  He  Who  is  prayed  to  are  both 
alike  free,  prayer  becomes  in  its  maturity  an  "  en- 
counter of  wills,"  and  may  affect  the  course  of  the 
world. 


XVI 

THE  HISTORICAL  JESUS  AND  THE 
ETERNAL  CHRIST 

NO  passage  in  human  history  has  had  larger 
consequences  for  the  whole  race  than  that  of 
which  the  central  figure  is  Jesus  of  Nazareth. 
Soon  or  late,  a  discussion  such  as  we  are  now  engaged 
upon  must  set  itself  to  face  the  questions  which  are 
raised  by  this  episode ;  and  it  will  be  convenient  for  the 
purpose  of  our  argument  to  consider  at  this  point  what 
results  will  accrue  from  the  endeavor  to  interpret  the 
person  and  mission  of  Jesus  from  the  standpoint  of  a  v 
thoroughgoing  spiritual  idealism.  It  may,  perhaps,  be 
of  some  advantage  to  anticipate  the  conclusions  of  this 
chapter  so  far  as  to  say  that  they  virtually  amount  to  a 
reaffirmation  of  the  Pauline  interpretation. 

I.  There  are  very  few  departments  of  knowledge 
and  activity  in  which  the  pressure  of  the  scientific  spirit 
has  not  effected  very  deep  and  far-reaching  conse- 
quences. Its  insistence  upon  the  absolute  validity  and 
relevancy  of  all  data,  upon  the  genuineness  of  the  evi- 
dence for  them,  has  set  the  fashion  throughout  the 
whole  range  of  intellectual  activity.  In  historical 
study  this  temper  has  expressed  itself  in  the  radical 
investigation  of  sources,  the  careful  and  punctilious 
sifting  of  evidence,  a  searching  criticism  of  documents. 

163 


i64        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

Historians  have  for  the  greater  part  in  the  last  two  or 
three  generations  concentrated  their  industry  upon  the 
discovery  and  attestation  of  historical  minutiae  and 
their  external  connections. 

It  was  inevitable  that  in  time  this  spirit  should 
invade  the  study  of  the  historical  foundations  of  the 
Christian  faith.  But  in  this  particular  region  the  prob- 
lem has  been  greatly  accentuated  by  the  gratuitous 
importation  of  rationalistic  presuppositions  into  the  in- 
quiry. Biblical  criticism  has  frequently  been  merely  a 
stalking  horse  for  private  theories;  and  it  is  very 
largely  to  this  tendency  that  the  misgiving  is  due  which 
has  been  felt  by  a  great  many  intelligent  folk  concern- 
ing the  validity  of  the  critical  methods  that  have  been 
applied  to  the  Bible.  Baur,  for  instance,  set  out  with 
certain  Hegelian  presuppositions  in  his  mind  which 
seemed  to  demand  a  Petro-Pauline  controversy  in  the 
sub-apostolic  Church,  and  his  criticism  amounted  to 
little  more  than  an  endeavor  to  read  this  hypothesis 
into  the  New  Testament.  This  is  precisely  the  method 
of  the  Anglo-Israelites  and  the  Christian  Scientists.  It 
is  part  of  the  evidence  of  the  wonderful  comprehen- 
siveness of  the  Scriptures  that  every  exaggeration  and 
perversity  of  faith  may  find  "  proof-texts  "  of  its  own 
pet  view  within  them. 

In  our  own  day  Schmiedel  has  conceived  a  perfectly 
arbitrary  criterion  of  the  genuineness  of  the  Gospel 
records.  By  his  test  only  nine  passages  in  the  Gospels 
have  "  absolute  credibility,"  and  these  alone  can  be 
taken  as  "  the  foundation  pillars  of  a  truly  scientific 
life  of  Jesus."  *  Before  saying  anything  as  to  the 
validity  of  Schmiedel's  criterion,  it  may  be  well  to 
*  "  Enc.  Biblica,"  ii.,  1181. 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      165 

observe  that  in  any  case  the  assumption  that,  unless 
the  recorded  matter  squares  with  a  certain  more  or 
less  arbitrarily  preconceived  idea  of  what  it  should  be, 
it  is  not  absolutely  credible,  is  hardly  evidence  of  a 
scientific  temper.  Science  does  not  impose  its  hypoth- 
eses upon  the  facts,  but  derives  them  from  the  facts. 
Criticism  of  this  kind  is  not  scientific  in  any  real  sense ; 
it  is  a  highly  private  and  personal  criticism,  and  a 
hundred  external  tests  might  be  applied  with  an  equal 
number  of  varying  results.  As  to  Schmiedel's  own  idea 
that  only  those  passages  which  show  no  traces  of  hero- 
worship  are  absolutely  credible,  the  obvious  remark 
is  that  it  is  quite  open  for  another  critic  to  come  along 
and  say  that  only  those  passages  are  absolutely  credible 
which  do  reflect  a  real  hero-worship.  For  is  not  the 
hero-worship  perhaps  the  most  significant  element  in 
the  whole  story,  seeing  that  only  nine  passages  show 
no  trace  of  it,  and  is  it  not  therefore  the  one  really 
indispensable  datum  for  a  truly  scientific  portrait  of 
the  person  who  evoked  it? 

But  this  is  not  the  scientific  way.  That  way  is  to 
ascertain  the  facts  by  an  unbiased  examination  of  the 
documentary  evidence  for  their  historicity  and  by  the 
elimination  of  inner  inconsistencies  and  contradictions, 
and  then  to  let  the  facts  tell  their  own  story.  It  does 
not  rule  out  a  set  of  facts  which  do  not  happen  to  be 
consistent  with  a  particular  hypothesis.  If  it  does  rule 
out  any  facts,  it  is  only  because  they  are  contradicted 
by  facts  that  have  better  attestation,  or  because  the 
evidence  for  them  is  inadequate,  suspicious,  or  obvi- 
ously false.  The  summary  way  in  which  the  miracu- 
lous element  in  the  Gospel  history  has  frequently  been 
ruled  out  as  incredible,  simply  because  on  a  certain 


i66        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

hypothesis  miracles  were  impossible,  was  not  the  sci- 
entific method,  but  the  denial  of  it.  It  is  idle  to  deny 
beforehand  that  miracles  are  incredible.  The  credi- 
bility of  miracles,  as  of  every  other  recorded  historical 
event,  is  a  question  of  evidence. 

Schmiedel's  expression,  "  a  truly  scientific  life  of 
Jesus,"  is  exceedingly  luminous.  For  it  is  the  outcome 
of  the  strange  obsession  that  the  thing  that  is  needed 
is  to  reduce  the  figure  of  Christ  to  the  lowest  possible 
dimensions.  There  is  at  first  sight  a  certain  plausi- 
bility in  the  view  that  the  growth  of  tradition  has  dis- 
torted the  simple  idyllic  humanity  of  Jesus  of  Naz- 
areth ;  and  that  our  duty  is  to  get  behind  all  tradition 
and  the  superstitious  veneration  which  has  gathered 
around  Him,  and  see  Him  in  the  primitive  simplicities 
of  His  Galilean  life.  So  we  have  cried,  "  Back  to  Je- 
sus." It  may  be  true  that  we  have  obscured  overmuch 
the  simple  unaffected  humanity  of  Jesus;  and  it  was 
well  that  we  should  be  called  back  to  it.  So  far  as 
the  criticism  of  the  Gospels  has  restored  to  us  some 
sense  of  the  manhood  of  the  Galilean  Jesus,  it  has  been 
all  to  the  good. 

It  is,  however,  necessary  to  assert  very  clearly  that, 
having  done  this  for  us,  it  has  done  all  it  can;  but  it 
has  not  done  all  we  need.  Its  work  has  been  prelim- 
inary and  preparatory  in  character ;  it  has  simply  paved 
the  way  for  a  new  reconstruction  of  the  inwardness  of 
the  Gospel  story  for  our  own  day.  It  has  cleared  the 
ground  of  much  perplexing  and  confusing  and  irrele- 
vant matter;  sometimes,  indeed,  leaving  a  good  deal  of 
intractable  lumber  of  its  own  behind.  But  criticism  is 
not  construction ;  and  it  does  not,  so  long  as  it  is  merely 
the  criticism  of  a  certain  group  of  historical  documents, 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      167 

provide  us  with  all  the  relevant  materials  for  construc- 
tion. For  we  have  not  determined  the  significance  of 
Jesus  when  we  have  written  a  '*  truly  scientific  "  ac- 
count of  His  life  between  Bethlehem  and  Calvary. 
What  is  of  even  more  importance  than  this  for  a  com- 
plete estimate  of  Jesus  is  the  history  of  the  ages  which 
succeeded  the  period  of  His  life.  "  How  came  it  to 
pass  that  this  particular  point  of  life  was  the  fountain- 
head  of  so  mighty  a  movement,  that  old  ideals  were 
shattered  and  new  ones  arose,  that  the  whole  previous 
balance  of  life  was  upset  and  previous  standards  failed 
to  satisfy,  that  a  mighty  longing  took  possession  of 
mankind,  a  stormy  unrest  which  even  now  after  hun- 
dreds of  years  is  not  allayed?  "  * 

2.  This  is  the  problem  that  calls  for  solution,  and 
which  mere  historical  criticism  cannot  solve.  It  is  the 
very  height  of  illogicality  to  bid  us  consider  the  limita- 
tions of  the  historical  Jesus ;  to  reduce  the  figure  of  the 
Jesus  of  the  Gospels  to  its  lowest  dimensions  does  not 
help  us  in  the  least.  Rather  it  accentuates  the  stress  of 
the  problem  instead  of  relieving  it.  It  may  satisfy  the 
demands  of  an  exaggerated  rationalism  to  reduce  the 
Gospel  story  to  a  mere  aggregate  of  bald,  inoffensive 
facts;  but  that  leaves  the  problem  of  the  subsequent 
history  in  a  very  much  less  hopeful  condition.  Even 
still  more  unintelligible  does  it  leave  the  fact  that 
ever  since  Jesus  came  out  upon  the  world  of  men,  they 
have  persisted  in  feeling  in  Him  a  uniqueness  and  in 
ascribing  to  Him  a  character  which  makes  Him  not  one 
of  a  class  but  a  class  by  Himself.  He  does  not  fit  into 
our  common  categories.  What  has  to  be  explained  is 
*  Eucken,  "Christianity  and  the  New  Idealism,"  p.  51. 


i68        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

the  total  impression  which  Jesus  has  made  upon  gen- 
erations of  men,  the  whole  human  sense  of  Jesus.  One 
may  go  to  the  Nicene  Creed  or  the  Formula  of  Chalce- 
don  or  the  Augsburg  Confession  to  see  how  men  have 
handled  the  metaphysical  questions  which  are  started 
by  the  Person  of  Jesus,  and  one  may  think  them  right 
or  wrong.  But  that  is  not  the  point.  The  point  is 
that  hundreds  and  thousands  of  men  and  women  in 
every  generation  since  His  day  have  had  a  sense  of  the 
significance  of  Jesus  to  their  own  lives  which  they 
could  only  express  by  worshipping  Jesus  as  God — so 
immediate  and  overwhelming  a  feeling  of  His  tran- 
scendent uniqueness  and  His  moral  majesty,  that  when 
they  thought  of  God  they  thought  of  Jesus,  that  they 
saw  the  face  of  Jesus  when  they  prayed  to  God.  Un- 
less one  is  going  to  write  down  the  very  deepest  ex- 
perience of  an  unbroken  succession  of  the  very  best 
men  and  women  in  all  the  Christian  ages  a  delusion  and 
a  madness,  one  is  not  going  by  any  process  of  historical 
criticism  to  get  away  from  a  Jesus  Who  cannot  be  ex- 
plained (and  explained  away)  as  merely  a  religious 
teacher  among  the  Jews  nineteen  hundred  years  ago. 
This  is  not  a  question  of  right  doctrine  or  wrong. 
Doctrines  change,  must  change,  with  growing  light. 
But  the  saint's  experience  of  Jesus  has  in  essence  never 
changed.  That  has  always  been  the  same.  In  the  life 
and  experience  of  the  faithful,  Jesus  Christ  is  yester- 
day the  same,  to-day,  and  for  ever.  Even  if  we  rule  the 
saint  out  as  a  person  of  morbid  soul,  we  are  still  face 
to  face  with  the  fact  that  men  whom  the  whole  sense 
of  history  regards  as  men  of  wholesome  and  vigorous 
spirit,  leaders  of  thought  and  action,  have  found  Jesus 
to  be  no  less  than  the  saints  have  found  him  to  be. 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      169 

There  was  Charles  Lamb,  who  told  a  mixed  company 
of  literary  people  that  if  He  were  to  come  into  the 
room  "  we  should  all  fall  down  and  try  to  kiss  the  hem 
of  His  garment."  There  was  Shelley  the  atheist,  who 
came  to  look  upon  Jesus  and  found  Him  the  very  per- 
fection of  all  that  was  best  in  himself.  There  was 
Mazzini,  patriot  and  prophet,  who  saw  the  hope  of  a 
liberated  nation  in  the  Cross.  There  was  Savonarola, 
who  wanted  a  king  for  Florence  and  made  Jesus  King. 
How  came  it  to  pass  that  a  Jew's  son,  a  craftsman 
of  Nazareth,  has  come  to  be  and  to  stand  for  all  this 
— to  respond  to  all  this  variety  and  complexity  of  hu- 
man instinct  and  aspiration? 

3.  It  is  all  the  more  necessary  to  insist  that  this 
is  the  only  adequate  statement  of  the  problem  pre- 
sented by  the  appearance  of  Jesus  and  its  historical 
consequences,  in  view  of  the  present  tendency  in 
criticism  to  regard  Him  purely  as  an  apocalyptic  vision- 
ary. If  the  strength  of  Jesus  had  lain  in  His  appeal  to 
the  prevailing  apocalyptic  temper,  how  came  it  to  pass 
that  the  whole  movement  of  which  He  was  the  centre 
did  not  collapse  under  the  pressure  of  continuous  and 
steady  disillusionment?  It  would  be  idle  to  deny  the 
presence  of  apocalyptic  elements  in  our  Lord's  outlook, 
but  the  very  continuance  of  Christianity  in  the  teeth 
of  the  non-fulfilment  of  the  apocalyptic  hope  proves  be- 
yond controversy  not  merely  the  presence  but  the  pre- 
dominance of  other  factors  in  His  message  and  work. 

The  apocalyptic  hypothesis  is  still  seeking  terra 
firma,  and  it  is  unnecessary  to  be  greatly  alarmed. 
When  the  question  of  the  literary  ancestry  of  Mark 
xiii.  and  the  related  passages  in  the  other  Gospels  has 


I70        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

been  thoroughly  explored,  it  is  almost  certain  that  it 
will  be  found  that,  in  the  compilation  of  the  records, 
what  was  the  comparatively  simple  and  straightfor- 
ward teaching  of  Jesus  concerning  the  destruction  of 
Jerusalem  and  His  Parousia  has  been  complicated  and 
confused  by  the  super-imposition  of  apocalyptic  mat- 
ter from  without.  The  traditional  "  stage  property  " 
of  Jewish  Apocalyptic  is  well  known  to-day;  and  obvi- 
ously a  good  deal  has  found  its  way  into  the  Gospels  by 
more  or  less  devious  ways.  We  need  not  meantime 
surrender  the  Jesus  Who  spoke  the  fourth  chapter  of 
Mark  in  favor  of  the  Jesus  to  Whom  the  latest  criticism 
weuld  attribute  the  thirteenth  as  His  really  character- 
istic utterance.  When  more  work  has  been  done  on 
the  lines  which  Mr.  Streeter  has  laid  down  in  his  es- 
say in  the  Oxford  "  Studies  in  the  Synoptic  Problem," 
it  will  be  time  enough  to  consider  how  far  we  are  to 
modify  our  picture  of  the  reasonable  convincing  Jesus 
of  the  earlier  teaching  by  the  addition  of  apocalyptic 
splashes.  It  is  certainly  necessary  to  inquire  very  care- 
fully how  far  the  prevailing  apocalyptic  temper  and 
previous  apocalyptic  literature  account  for  the  presence 
of  Apocalyptic  in  the  New  Testament,  and  for  the  keen 
apocalyptic  hope  in  the  early  part  of  the  apostolic  age. 
For  unless  Jesus  had  Himself  undergone  some  sharp 
revolution  of  outlook  at  the  beginning  of  the  last  week 
of  His  life,  it  is  impossible  to  believe  that  His  teaching 
was  responsible  for  all  this.  The  difference  in  tone 
and  color  between  the  earlier  teaching  and  the  apoca- 
lyptic passages  is  far  too  profound  to  be  explained 
save  on  the  supposition  of  some  such  revolution. 

At  the  same  time  the  investigation  of  the  apocalyptic 
elements  of  Christianity  and  the  discovery  of  the  spir- 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      171 

itual  truth  which  underlies  them  may  indirectly  help  us 
in  our  ultimate  reinterpretation  of  Jesus.  For,  as  I 
have  endeavored  to  indicate  in  a  previous  chapter,  the 
feeling  that  underlies  the  apocalyptic  hope,  grotesque 
and  curious  as  its  form  may  sometimes  be,  is  that  the 
divine  order  may  break  into  the  world  across  the  su- 
perficial processes  of  normal  history.  The  appearance 
of  Jesus,  by  reason  of  His  own  unique  personality 
and  the  historical  consequences  which  followed  it, 
must,  I  think,  be  accepted  as  such  a  break  in  the 
course  of  ordinary  historical  processes. 

4.  It  is  due  to  the  pressure  of  the  evolution  idea 
that  we  have  been  endeavoring  to  whittle  down  the 
dimensions  of  Jesus  so  that  He  may  fit  into  our  little 
schemes  of  thought.  But  the  bankruptcy  of  an  uncom- 
promising evolution  hypothesis  in  the  region  of  or- 
ganic life  shows  that  we  had  been  better  advised  if  we 
had  left  the  Gospels  and  the  subsequent  history  to  tell 
their  own  story.  There  are  effects  in  the  world  to 
which  we  can  assign  no  adequate  cause  while  we  admit 
the  existence  of  a  cause;  and  our  endeavor  to  discover 
causes  which  would  account  for  Jesus  has  led  us  into  an 
extravagance  of  ingenuity  which  has  only  stultified  our 
methods.  Theattempt  to  capture  Jesus  and  hold  Him  in 
an  historical  pigeon-hole  has  been  an  increasing  failure. 

The  appearance  of  Jesus  was  a  real  historical  begin- 
ning. It  is  possible  to  trace  the  development  of  the 
particular  environment  into  which  He  came — the  long 
discipline  of  the  Jews,  the  ministry  of  the  prophets,  the 
impact  of  Babylonian,  Greek,  Roman,  and  other  influ- 
ences upon  the  historical  progress  of  Jewish  life.  In 
this  there  was  a  real  evolution — at  least,  a  chain  of 


172        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

perceptible  historical  cause  and  effect.  But  in  all  great 
creative  epochs  there  have  always  been  two  factors — 
personality  and  environment.  They  issue  from  the 
meeting  of  the  man  and  the  moment.  The  antecedent 
history  of  the  moment  may  be  traced  back  through 
previous  ages.  But  in  the  man  there  is  always  the 
emergence  of  something  new,  distinctive,  which  cannot 
be  traced  back  to  purely  historical  origins.  We  can 
trace  the  natural  history  of  the  soil  and  the  atmosphere 
of  the  period  in  which  the  Protestant  Reformation 
came  to  birth  in  many  streams  of  tendency  and  influ- 
ence, but  we  cannot  trace  back  the  fiery  eruption  in 
Luther's  soul  to  any  historical  circumstance  or  any  set 
of  them.  There  is  nothing  in  his  heredity  or  education 
to  account  for  it.  It  was  a  direct  communication  of 
spiritual  life  which  transformed  his  experience,  and 
which  became  the  agent  of  that  creative  synthesis  out 
of  which  grew  the  modern  era  with  its  struggle  for 
freedom.  It  helps  us  very  little  indeed  to  imagine  that 
we  can  interpret  the  personality  of  Jesus  by  a  study  of 
the  historical  and  intellectual  background  of  the  Gos- 
pels. We  certainly  can  explain,  so,  the  environment 
into  which  He  came.  But  what  will  baffle  all  attempt 
at  explanation  in  this  way  is  the  emergence  in  Him  of 
that  spiritual  force  which  has  produced  vaster  and 
more  distinctive  historical  consequences  than  can  be 
attributed  to  the  life  and  work  of  any  other  individual 
whomsoever. 

5.  But  the  uniqueness  of  Jesus  does  not  begin  with 
the  character  and  dimensions  of  the  historical  conse- 
quences of  His  life.  We  discover  it  immediately  in 
His  immunity  from  that  moral  distemper  which  we 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      173 

call  sin.     This  is  usually  spoken  of  negatively  as  His 
sinlessness ;  but  the  ethical  uniqueness  of  Jesus  lies  ( 
rather  in  a  positive  moral  perfection  which  has  made  1 
Him  the  absolute  norm  and  measure  of  character  and  I 
conduct  from  His  day  to  ours.  ^ 

Some  endeavor  has  been  made  to  prove  that  Jesus 
did  not  possess  this  quality  of  sinlessness.  But  the 
strained  and  elaborate  ingenuity,  the  very  cleverness  of 
the  attempt,  proves  its  real  hopelessness;  and  it  is  a 
curious  piece  of  irony  that  anyone  should  endeavor  to 
prove  Jesus  morally  imperfect  in  the  light  of  the  very 
ethic  which  He  Himself  introduced  into  the  world.  It 
is  a  logical  thing  in  those  who  deny  the  value  and  truth 
of  the  Christian  ethic — for  instance,  our  modern  Goth- 
ists — to  impugn  the  character  and  conduct  of  Jesus 
from  their  point  of  view;  but  even  they  can  hardly 
deny  that  Jesus  embodied  in  His  own  life  the  ethic 
which  He  taught.  Jesus  brought  a  new  ethic  into  the 
world — an  ethic  which  was  a  complete  departure  from 
current  ethical  ideas.  The  question  of  His  sinlessness  is 
the  question  whether  He  Himself  gave  in  His  life  an 
adequate  and  worthy  interpretation  of  His  peculiar 
ethic. 

An  ethic  is,  of  course,  a  derivative.  The  naturalistic 
theory  derives  morality  from  the  necessities  of  social 
existence.  Nietzsche's  ethic  derives  from  his  master- 
conception  of  the  overman.  Jesus'  ethic  was  likewise 
derivative;  and  its  origin  lay  in  His  conception  of  the 
spiritual  life  as  the  true  life  of  man,  of  human  life  in 
its  relation  to  God,  which  in  the  ultimate  analysis 
means  that  it  derived  from  Jesus'  conception  of  the 
character  of  God.  God  was  the  Holy  Father;  and 
His  supreme  attribute  was  Holy  Love. 


174        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

It  is  too  late  in  the  day  to  ask  the  question  whether 
Jesus  could  have  sinned.  The  question  can  only  be 
asked  where  a  doctrinal  view  of  the  Person  of  Jesus 
is  assumed  beforehand.  The  fact  that  Jesus  was 
tempted  proves  that  He  did  not  possess  a  constitutional 
immunity  from  sin.  Otherwise  the  temptation  was  a 
dumb-show,  and  lacks  all  moral  value.  More  than 
that,  if  Jesus  had  no  liability  to  sin,  the  story  of  the 
temptation  shows  Him  taking  part  in  a  piece  of  play- 
acting. To  believe  that  Jesus  could  not  sin  is  to 
make  Him  a  sinner.  The  story  of  the  temptation, 
since  it  must  have  come  from  Jesus  Himself,  compels 
us  to  believe  in  Jesus'  liability  to  sin,  if  we  are  to  pre- 
serve our  idea  of  His  sinlessness;  for  either  the  temp- 
tation was  a  real,  terrible  danger,  or  Jesus  represents 
Himself  as  playing  a  part.  It  is  not  difficult  to  choose 
between  these  alternatives.  He  would  not  be  the  Je- 
sus we  know  if  He  were  not  free. 

But  though  He  was  open  to  temptation.  He  did  not 
fall  into  sin.  This  is  the  one  point  on  which  the  evi- 
dence of  the  New  Testament,  recording  as  it  does  the 
evidence  of  His  contemporaries,  is  overwhelming. 
From  John  the  Baptist  to  Pilate's  wife,  the  evidence  of 
friend  and  foe  contains  no  contradiction.  The  worst 
His  enemies  could  say  of  Him  was  that  He  sat  at  meat 
with  sinners — and  this  was  supreme  grace.  When  Pe- 
ter bade  Jesus  depart  from  himself,  a  sinful  man,  when 
Judas  returned  the  price  of  innocent  blood,  when  the 
centurion  perforce  confessed  Him  a  righteous  man, 
they  all  alike  testified  to  their  impression  of  the  clear, 
transparent  moral  perfectness  of  Jesus.  Paul  declares 
that  "  He  knew  no  sin."  Peter  calls  Him  "  the  Holy 
and  Righteous  One,"  "  The  Righteous  who  died  for 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      175 

the  unrighteous  ";  the  disciple  whom  Jesus  loved  says 
that  "  in  Him  was  no  sin,"  and  the  author  of  Hebrews 
describes  Him  as  "  holy,  guileless,  undefiled,  separate 
from  sinners,"  and  says  plainly  that  He  was  "  with- 
out sin."  This  was  the  impression  which  He  made  on 
those  nearest  to  Him. 

Jesus  does  not  say  much  about  it  Himself.  He  once 
challenged  His  enemies  with  the  question,  "  Which  of 
you  convicteth  Me  of  sin?"  He  declared  moreover, 
"  I  do  always  the  things  that  are  pleasing  to  God." 
One  question  seems  to  imply  a  doubt  of  His  sense  of 
moral  perfection :  "  Why  callest  thou  Me  good?  There 
is  none  good,  save  God."  But  this  may  have  meant  no 
more  than  that  Jesus  had  no  use  for  a  meaningless  com- 
pliment. If,  however,  we  may  not  infer  much  from 
what  Jesus  did  say,  we  may  infer  a  good  deal  from 
what  He  did  not  say.  He  never  confessed  to  personal 
sin.  He  was  ever  insisting  that  others  should  ask  for 
the  forgiveness  of  sins ;  but  He  never  asked  for  it  Him- 
self, nor  showed  that  He  felt  the  need  of  it.  It  has  been 
the  experience  of  the  saints  to  be  increasingly  conscious 
of  their  sinfulness,  so  that  Paul  at  the  end  of  his  life 
could  describe  himself  as  the  chief  of  sinners.  But  Je- 
sus showed  no  sense  analogous  to  this.  He  knew  no 
sin. 

The  sinlessness  of  Jesus  was  not  a  mere  passive 
innocence.  It  was  a  massive,  powerful  goodness.  He 
was  good  in  a  great  epic  sense.  And  by  reason  of  His 
sinlessness.  His  is  proved  to  be  a  radical  goodness, 
not  the  fitful  goodness  of  other  men.  It  was  not 
goodness  without  a  struggle;  but  it  was  a  goodness 
which  always  triumphed,  and  the  struggles  confirmed 
and  deepened  it. 


176         THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

Moral  goodness  is  not  one  grace,  but  a  complex  of 
graces;  and  if  we  are  to  appreciate  fully  the  positive 
side  of  Jesus'  goodness  we  must  analyze  it  in  a  little 
detail.  There  are  two  great  aspects  of  moral  good- 
ness, individual  and  social.  There  are  on  the  one  side 
moral  qualities  which  are  primarily  personal — that  is, 
the  absence  of  them  affects  the  individual  himself  more 
than  they  affect  anyone  else.  Of  this  kind  are  personal 
purity,  honesty,  truthfulness,  and  the  like.  There  are, 
on  the  other  hand,  moralities  which  are  more  distinctly 
social  in  their  reaction.  Such  are  pity,  sympathy, 
brotherliness.  The  distinction  cannot,  of  course,  be 
rigid.  The  impure  man  hurts  his  fellows  as  well  as 
himself.  The  sympathetic  man  enriches  himself  as 
well  as  his  fellows.  We  are  so  bound  up  with  one  an- 
other that  we  cannot  be  or  do  anything,  even  in  the 
secret  of  our  souls,  which  is  without  its  effect  upon 
others  outside  us.  Yet  the  broad  distinction  remains. 
Moral  goodness  in  act  and  habit  is  a  complex  of  two 
families  of  moral  qualities  which  may  be  gathered  up 
under  the  two  general  heads  of  holiness  and  love.  The 
one  half  does  not  thrive  apart  from  the  other.  We 
have  perhaps  been  apt  to  forget  this,  and  to  imagine 
that  emphasis  upon  the  one  side  relieves  us  in  some 
measure  from  the  obligation  of  the  other.  This  was 
the  defect  of  the  Puritan  character,  whose  severe  holi- 
ness left  little  room  for  the  milk  of  human  kindness.  It 
was  a  wintry,  austere  morality.  On  the  other  hand,  it 
is  perhaps  due  to  the  neglect  of  the  emphasis  upon  per- 
sonal holiness  that  our  current  notions  of  love  lack 
strength  and  seriousness,  that  we  confound  purity  with 
prudishness,  and  bravery  with  bravado.  The  parable 
of  Sir  Galahad  is,  however,  perennially  true : — 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      177 

His  streng-th  was  as  the  strength  of  ten, 
Because  his  heart  was  pure. 

In  the  character  of  Jesus,  holiness  and  love  go 
together  blended  deeply  and  perfectly.  His  hatred  of 
sin  went  with  a  great  compassion  for  the  sinner.  His 
purity  was  unsullied;  His  uprightness  never  called  in 
question.  Great  popular  leaders  have  frequently  been 
driven  to  shifts  and  compromises.  This  is  not  true  in 
a  single  instance  of  Jesus.  Before  His  hour  was  come, 
He  retired  out  of  the  danger  zone.  When  it  was  come. 
He  went  His  way  and  faced  the  consequences.  He  pre- 
ferred death  to  any  compromise  on  moral  issues.  And 
this  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  the  way  of  compromise 
was  easy.  The  astute  ecclesiastics  of  His  day  would 
have  welcomed  Him  with  His  power  and  ability  as  an 
associate.  There  have  been  leaders  of  revolutions  in 
human  history  who  have  capitulated  to  the  flattery 
and  the  blandishments  of  reactionaries.  Browning's 
"  Lost  Leader  "  is  a  real  type.  But  it  was  not  so 
with  Jesus.  He  refused  all  short  and  easy  ways  to  His 
end.  He  gave  no  quarter  and  asked  for  none.  His 
holiness  was  unbending,  His  purity  of  motive  unassail- 
able. And  when  one  recalls  in  addition  to  all  this  His 
love  for  little  children,  His  chivalry  to  the  fallen,  His 
compassion  for  the  weak,  the  splendid  abandon  of  His 
self-sacrifice,  one  sees  another  side  of  His  character; 
and  it  is  difficult  to  say  which  is  the  more  impressive. 
It  leaves  no  alternative  but  to  say  that  in  Him  there 
was  a  perfect  confluence  of  absolute  holiness  and  ab- 
solute love. 

Upon  these  two  points  hang  all  the  graces  which  we 
inevitably  associate  with  Jesus.  His  perfect  balance.  His 
unbroken  calm,  the  usual  absence  of  anything  like  a 


178        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

sense  of  strain  or  effort,  His  patience,  His  meekness,  His 
lowliness — these  were  the  "fruits  of  theSpirit"  inHim. 

6.  The  moral  character  of  Jesus,  however,  is  only 
one  aspect  of  His  uniqueness.  He  alone  bore  our  hu- 
manity free  from  moral  distemper,  but  in  Him  it  was 
free  from  other  limitations  of  a  non-ethical  character 
which  qualify  manhood  in  the  rest  of  us.  That  these 
limitations  do  not  operate  in  the  case  of  Jesus  is  no  less 
significant  than  His  immunity  from  moral  imperfection. 

This  aspect  of  the  Personality  of  Jesus  may  perhaps 
be  best  illustrated  in  this  way. 

The  average  Frenchman  can  never  understand 
Oliver  Cromwell,  any  more  than  the  average  English- 
man can  understand  John  Knox.  We  should  not  ask 
a  German  to  say  the  last  word  about  Joan  of  Arc,  or 
an  Italian  about  Martin  Luther.  Education  and  travel 
and  the  growth  of  international  feeling  have  done 
much  to  familiarize  the  nations  with  each  other's 
heroes.  Nevertheless,  the  racial  equation  still  remains 
an  essential  element  in  the  complete  interpretation  of 
the  great  historical  figures. 

But  the  point  can  be  pushed  a  great  deal  farther. 
Not  every  Englishman  can  or  does  understand  Oliver 
Cromwell.  It  requires  an  Englishman  of  a  certain 
type,  the  man  of  Puritan  heredity  and  spirit.  It  is  no- 
torious that  the  name  of  Cromwell  only  irritates  many 
of  his  countrymen.  Not  only  the  race  factor,  then, 
but  what  we  may  call  the  temperament  factor  is  also 
necessary  in  order  fullyto  understandany  givenperson. 

There  is  still  another  step  which  we  need  to  take. 
The  modern  Puritan  may  be  able  to  trace  and  appre- 
ciate the  historical  consequences  of  Cromwell's  brief 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      179 

but  momentous  intrusion  into  English  politics.  He 
may  be  able  to  analyze  Cromwell's  mind  and  character 
so  far  as  to  discover  the  mainsprings  of  his  actions. 
But  he  can  never  feel  that  v^arm  immediate  sympathy, 
that  intense  personal  spell,  which  bound  Cromwell's 
men  to  him  as  with  bands  of  steel.  Times  have 
changed,  and  with  them  the  temper  of  society,  the  reli- 
gious outlook,  the  national  character.  We  may  study, 
admire,  respect  Cromwell,  but  the  most  fierce  Puritan 
of  us  all  cannot  get  up  a  genuine  personal  passion  for 
him.  It  required  a  fierce  Puritan  of  his  own  time  to  do 
that;  for  Cromwell — as  we  of  ours — was  the  child  of 
his  time.  Not  only,  then,  do  we  need  the  race  factor 
and  the  temperament  factor,  we  need  also  to  admit 
the  time  factor  as  a  condition  of  a  full  and  intelligent 
understanding  of  an  historical  person. 

But  what  is  true  of  the  understanding  of  Oliver 
Cromwell  is  not  true  of  the  understanding  of  Jesus  of 
Nazareth.  He  was  a  Jew — in  everything;  yet  this  is 
almost  the  last  thing  we  think  of  concerning  Him.  He 
appeals  to  every  race  of  men  without  distinction;  and 
our  missionary  records  tell  us  how  the  Mongol  finds 
as  many  and  as  easy  points  of  contact  with  Him  as  a 
Latin  or  a  Celt.  It  is  probably  true  that  He  does  not 
appear  altogether  the  same  to  the  Eastern  as  to  the 
Western  eye;  but  that  is  due  not  to  any  difference  in 
Him,  but  to  the  difference  in  those  who  look  upon 
Him.  In  His  own  day  the  foreigner  found  easy  ac- 
cess to  Him.  A  Syro-Phcenician  woman  could  not  be 
driven  away  from  Him.  A  Samaritan  woman  was 
surprised  to  find  herself  conversing  intimately  with 
Him.  A  Roman  officer  found  it  easy  to  approach 
Him.     Yet  the  very  gait  of  a  Jew  of  any  consequence 


i8o       THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

in  those  days  bade  the  foreigner  keep  his  distance. 
When  in  later  days  His  story  went  abroad  among  the 
Western  nations,  first  the  Hellene,  then  the  Latin,  then 
the  Teuton  and  the  Celt,  all  capitulated  to  Him.  He 
appealed  to  them  all — in  different  ways  and  at  different 
points,  no  doubt — but  so  effectively  that  they  all  re- 
sponded. Compare  this  with  the  story  of  Mahomet. 
Mahomet  has  never  touched  the  outer  west  or  the  outer 
east,  the  farther  north  or  the  farther  south.  His  ap- 
peal, powerful  as  in  many  ways  it  has  been,  has  been 
nevertheless  restricted  and  narrow.  But  east  and 
west,  north  and  south,  the  Person  of  Christ  has 
touched  the  minds  and  hearts  of  men.  Even  the  Mo- 
hammedans have  made  a  Mohammedan  of  Him. 

Nor  is  it  only  to  men  of  one  peculiar  temperament 
that  He  makes  His  appeal.  Men  of  reflection  and  men 
of  action  have  alike  found  their  highest  inspiration  in 
Him.  The  philosopher  and  the  moralist  have  been 
forced  to  take  account  of  Him.  No  other  single  in- 
dividual has  so  stimulated  the  artistic  powers,  whether 
in  music  or  painting;  the  poet  and  the  social  reformer 
have  sat  at  His  feet.  He  accounts  for  the  massiveness 
of  an  Augustine,  the  power  of  a  Luther,  the  endurance 
of  a  Hus,  and  the  heroism  of  a  Gordon.  The  nobleman 
and  the  peasant,  both  have  bowed  to  Him.  So,  in  His 
own  day,  Joseph  of  Arimathea  and  Matthew  the  pub- 
lican— men  at  extreme  poles  of  social  status — followed 
Him.  The  calm,  reflective  Nathanael  and  the  impetu- 
ous Peter  found  themselves  at  His  feet.  Mary  Magda- 
lene and  Mary  of  Bethany,  Martha  and  Pilate's  wife, 
all  fell  alike  under  His  spell.  All  men  found  points  of 
contact  with  Him,  who  came  within  touching  distance. 

Lastly,  His  appeal  is  not  confined  to  a  particular 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      i8i 

age.  The  whole  course  of  Christian  history  is  studded 
with  those  martyrdoms  which  show  how,  not  only 
among  all  races,  but  in  all  ages,  men  have  been  bound 
to  Him  by  indissoluble  ties  of  loyalty  and  love.  From 
the  Christian  slaves  who  were  martyred  "  to  make  a 
Roman  holiday,"  to  the  Chinese  Christians  of  our  own 
day  who  died  rather  than  disobey  Him,  there  has  been 
no  decline  of  His  personal  power  over  men.  He  be- 
longs not  to  one  age,  but  to  every  age.  The  change 
which  time  brings  may  change  the  exact  incidence  of 
His  appeal,  but  it  abates  none  of  its  force.  Jesus  has 
never  been  out  of  date. 

This  universality  of  His  person  is  reflected  in  His 
outlook  upon  life  and  in  His  teaching.  Look,  for  in- 
stance, at  His  illustrations.  The  prodigal  son  is  a  per- 
ennially universal  type.  The  stories  of  the  lost  coin,  the 
Good  Samaritan,  the  Pharisee  and  the  Publican,  are 
for  ever  true.  We  know  such  persons  as  the  prodigal 
and  the  Samaritan,  the  Pharisee  and  the  publican,  per- 
fectly well.  They  are  here  with  us  to-day.  Mr.  G.  K. 
Chesterton  not  long  ago  said  a  very  true  and  a  very 
fine  thing.  Speaking  of  the  principle  that  self-sacrifice 
is  the  way  of  self-realization,  he  added:  "Jesus  said 
that  long  ago,  as  He  said  almost  everything." 

Let  us  take  a  step  still  farther.  The  differences  of 
race,  age,  and  temperament  are  more  or  less  accidental. 
The  difference  of  sex  cuts  a  great  deal  deeper.  It  is 
the  very  deepest  and  most  universal  of  human  distinc- 
tions. Tennyson  used  to  speak  of  the  "  man-woman  " 
in  Jesus.  It  would  be  very  difificult  to  discover  a  single 
act  of  His  which  a  woman  might  not  have  done.  Even 
the  cleansing  of  the  temple  was  not  so  much  an  achieve- 
ment of  physical  strength  as  of  moral  power;  and  there 


i82         THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

have  been  women  In  history  capable  of  acts  of  the  same 
kind.  We  usually  ascribe  the  qualities  of  initiative  and 
aggressive  strength  to  men,  gentleness  and  the  strength 
of  endurance  to  women;  and  in  a  general  way  the 
ascription  is  sound.  It  would  puzzle  us  very  consider- 
ably to  say  which  was  the  more  prominent  in  Jesus. 
Among  His  friends  were  as  many  women  as  men.  And 
in  His  wider  appeal  to  the  nations  He  has  spoken  with 
even  more  power  to  women  than  to  men.  Yet  He  was 
a  true  man,  the  embodiment  of  the  ultimate  manliness. 

It  is  impossible  not  to  feel  that  the  humanity  of 
Jesus  was  elemental,  that  it  seemed  to  transcend  the 
surface  distinctions  of  nation  or  station,  temperament 
or  sex.  His  was  the  pure  primal  essence  of  manhood, 
unqualified  and  undifferentiated  by  any  of  those  acci- 
dents which  divide  the  Jew  and  the  Gentile,  the  king 
and  the  peasant,  the  ancient  and  the  modern,  the  man 
and  the  woman.  Yet  He  was  a  peasant  of  Galilee. 
Hailing  from  an  obscure  village  in  an  obscure  land, 
born  of  a  people  trained  through  long  ages  into  un- 
paralleled exclusiveness  and  narrowness,  appearing  at 
perhaps  the  very  lowest  ebb  in  the  history  of  religion 
and  thought,  yet  there  was  a  universality  in  His  out- 
look which  bade  His  disciples  go  and  make  disciples  of 
all  nations,  and  a  universality  in  the  appeal  of  His  man- 
hood which  has  made  and  is  still  making  for  Him  disci- 
ples among  all  peoples  to  whom  He  has  been  preached. 

It  is  the  inevitable  corollary  of  this  that  in  the 
moral  character  of  Jesus  there  should  likewise  be  such 
spaciousness  as  His  personality  discloses.  We  may  ap- 
ply the  epithet  Christlike  to  two  men  whom  we  can 
scarcely  compare  at  any  two  points.  Here  is  a  man  of 
unique  gentleness,  another  whose  endurance  of  suffer- 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      183 

ing  is  calm  and  cheerful  and  heroic,  a  third  whose  sac- 
rifice for  others  is  perfect  and  uncalculating.  The 
highest  tribute  we  pay  to  them  is  to  call  them  Christ- 
like. The  tender  simplicity  of  Francis,  the  self-denying 
devotion  of  John  Wesley,  the  moral  courage  of  Luther 
— whatsoever,  indeed,  is  lovely  and  true  and  gracious 
in  men,  therein  we  instinctively  compare  them  to  and 
link  them  up  with  Jesus.  For  we  find  all  these  things 
in  their  highest  known  expression  in  Him.  Jesus  is  not 
a  type  of  moral  character.  He  is  the  very  universe  of  it. 

7.  It  is  no  part  of  our  present  purpose  to  inquire 
what  manner  of  doctrinal  conclusions  these  character- 
istics of  Jesus  point  to.  It  is  imperative,  however,  to 
understand  what  practical  consequences  followed  in 
human  experience  from  contact  with  Jesus — how  those 
who  have  been  most  competent  to  judge  have  placed 
Him.  Let  it  be  emphasized  that  it  is  impossible  to 
dissociate  Jesus  from  the  Cross,  and  the  actual  signi- 
ficance of  Christ  in  human  experience  is  inseparably 
bound  up  with  the  practical  results  of  His  death.  In 
the  meantime  it  is  necessary  and  possible  to  consider 
how  those  who  were  nearest  to  Him  in  point  of  time 
actually  interpreted  Him. 

One  thing  is  perfectly  obvious.  Whatever  the  value 
of  the  evidence  for  the  Resurrection  may  be  (and  here 
it  is  not  proposed  to  attempt  any  appreciation  of  it), 
the  early  Christians  habitually  thought  of  Jesus  as 
alive.  This  was  central  to  their  whole  scheme  of 
things.  His  significance  to  them  was  not  determined  by 
His  passage  from  Bethlehem  to  Calvary.  One  of  the 
most  stupendous  achievements  of  the  apostolic  age  was 
the  way  in  which  the  purely  local  and  temporary  cir- 


i84        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

cumstances  were  transcended  and  Christ  came  to  be 
thought  of  in  spiritual  and  universal  terms.  What 
the  apostolic  mind  did  with  Jesus  is  precisely  what 
Rudolf  Eucken  teaches  us  we  should  do  with  history — 
get  beneath  what  is  temporal  and  local  and  accidental 
and  lay  hold  of  the  essential  spiritual  inwardness.  To 
Paul  the  mere  minutiae  of  the  Gospel  story  were  mat- 
ters of  indifference.  He  is  concerned  almost  only  with 
the  death  and  resurrection  of  Jesus — the  great  sum- 
mary facts  in  which  the  entire  truth  of  the  life  of 
Jesus  is  gathered  up,  the  points  at  which  the  real  sig- 
nificance of  Jesus  breaks  out  most  obviously  and  irre- 
sistibly. His  neglect  of  the  history  is  not  merely 
accidental.  It  seems  to  be  part  of  a  definite  policy. 
"  Though  we  have  known  Christ  after  the  flesh,  yet 
now  henceforth  know  we  Him  no  more."  In  Romans 
X.  6-8,  Paul  seems  to  be  stating  categorically  (through 
a  citation)  that  to  bring  Christ  down  from  heaven  or 
up  from  the  abyss — that  is  to  say,  to  restore  an  histori- 
cal Jesus — is  wholly  out  of  keeping  with  the  spirit  and 
genius  of  the  Gospel.  What  is  needed,  he  appears  to 
suggest,  is  a  point  of  view — the  "  word  "  which  is  in 
our  hearts — if  we  are  to  apprehend  the  significance 
of  the  Gospel. 

This  inward  "  word  "  is  the  spiritual  point  of  view 
from  which  Paul  demands  that  all  the  things  of  God 
shall  be  contemplated.  "  The  natural  man  receiveth  not 
the  things  of  the  Spirit  of  God."  He  is  incapable 
of  it.  Only  the  Spirit  of  God  can  reveal  these  things 
to  him;  and  the  spiritual  man  is  he  in  whom  the  Spirit 
of  God  dwells.  "  He  that  is  spiritual  judgeth  all 
things."  And  this  spiritual  point  of  view  is  immedi- 
ately defined  as  "  the  mind  of  Christ." 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      185 

To  interpret  Christ  with  the  mind  of  Christ — this  is 
what  the  apostoHc  mind  set  itself  to  do.  We  know 
what  the  consequences  were.  In  the  prologue  of  John's 
Gospel  we  find  an  attempt  to  define  the  real  inwardness 
of  Jesus.  He  was  the  eternal  Word  become  incarnate. 
"  And  we  beheld  His  glory  as  the  glory  of  the  only  be- 
gotten of  the  Father,  full  of  grace  and  truth."  In  the 
Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  He  is  called  "  the  express  image 
of  God's  person  and  the  effulgence  of  His  glory." 
Paul  says  that  "  the  light  of  the  knowledge  of  the  glory 
of  God  shines  upon  us  in  the  face  of  Jesus  Christ." 
From  all  of  which  it  would  appear  that  at  least  Jesus 
had  the  value  of  God  to  His  intimates.  The  figure  of 
the  historical  Jesus  refused  to  remain  static.  To  these 
men's  eyes  it  grew  until  it  filled  that  blank  space  upon 
which  they,  like  their  fathers  before  them,  had  been 
trying  to  draw  the  outlines  of  the  face  of  God.  They 
saw  the  glory  of  God  in  "  the  face  of  Jesus  Christ." 

That  one  Face  far  from  vanish — rather  grows 
And  decomposes  but  to  recompose, 
Becomes  my  universe  that  feels  and  knows. 

This  word  "  universe  "  is  indeed  the  only  word  which 
can  describe  the  impression  that  this  thoroughgoing 
spiritual  interpretation  of  Jesus  brings  with  it.  It  is  the 
only  word  which  describes  Paul's  sense  of  the  super- 
historic  Jesus.  The  name  Christ  occupies,  in  Paul's 
scheme,  what  the  term  Logos  occupies  in  John's,  and 
seems  to  represent  the  very  universe  in  which  the 
creative  and  redemptive  thought  of  God  moved. 

The  term  Logos,  by  means  of  which  John  endeav- 
ored to  interpret  the  origin  of  Jesus,  had  a  long  previ- 
ous history  in  Greek  thought.    Whether  we  are  to  as- 


i86        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

sume  that  John  was  consciously  reading  into  the  word 
what  thinkers  before  him  had  included  in  it,  is  a  ques- 
tion which  we  need  not  discuss  here.  The  originality 
of  John's  treatment  of  it  lies  in  the  statement,  "  the 
Word  became  flesh."  It  was  a  daring  flight  of 
thought  to  identify  the  Logos  of  God  with  the  histori- 
cal Jesus,  and  the  tremendous  impulse  which  lay  be- 
hind the  thought  and  enabled  it  to  take  this  leap  has  to 
be  explained.  This  Gospel,  perhaps  the  latest  of  the 
New  Testament  books,  is  far  away  the  most  clear  and 
emphatic  in  its  assertion  of  the  pre-existence  of  Jesus 
as  the  Eternal  Logos,  the  Eternal  Son,  and  in  its  en- 
deavor to  satisfy  the  growing  demand  for  an  inter- 
pretation of  Jesus  which  should  do  justice  to  the  apos- 
tolic sense  of  His  immense  significance. 

Though  Paul  does  not  use  the  word  Logos,  he  is 
not  one  whit  behind  John  in  his  attempt  to  explain  the 
inwardness  of  Jesus.  To  him  the  Jesus  of  history  was 
one  with  the  super-historic  Christ;  and  in  the  super- 
historic  Christ  Paul  sees  the  origin  and  destiny  of  all 
things.  He  is  the  "  image  of  the  Invisible  God,  the 
firstborn  of  all  creation";  in  Him  "were  all  things 
created  ...  all  things  have  been  created  through  Him 
and  unto  Him  ...  in  Him  all  things  consist."  * 
Christ  it  is  "  in  Whom  are  all  the  treasures  of  wisdom 
and  knowledge  hidden."  f  God  has  purposed  "  to  sum 
up  all  things  in  Christ."  t  "  God  was  in  Christ  recon- 
ciling the  world  unto  Himself."  §  Yet  the  significance 
of  Christ  is  not  only  cosmic.  The  name  certainly  rep- 
resents the  very  inmost  mind  and  purpose  of  God, 
the  whole  outgoing  of  God  toward  the  universe  and 
toward  man.  But  it  has  nevertheless  a  very  intimate 
*  Col.  i.  15-17.    fCol.  ii.  3.     :}:Eph.  i.  10.    gaCor.  v.  19. 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      187 

personal  connection.  "  I  am  crucified  with  Christ." 
"  Till  Christ  be  formed  within  you."  "  Christ  in  you, 
the  hope  of  glory."  "  That  Christ  may  dwell  in  your 
hearts  by  faith."  "  God  sends  forth  the  Spirit  of 
His  Son  into  our  hearts." 

8.  When  the  Church  began  first  to  embody  its 
sense  of  the  meaning  of  Jesus  in  a  formula,  it  began  a 
task  to  which  there  is  no  end.  It  is  clearly  impossible 
to  capture  the  whole  inwardness  of  a  Christ  Who 
stands  for  so  much.  It  "  breaks  through  language  and 
escapes."  The  great  temerity  of  Paul's  speech  arises 
from  the  fact  that  he  was  dealing  with  a  matter  that  he 
could  only  hope  to  compass  by  far-flung  figures  and 
desperate  straining  of  words.  But  we  shall  hardly  ap- 
preciate Paul's  endeavor  to  interpret  the  significance 
of  Jesus  unless  we  remember  that  he  was  at  bottom 
endeavoring  to  explicate  his  own  personal  experience. 
There  had  come  to  him  a  new  life  through  his  contact 
with  Christ,  and  there  was  scarcely  one  respect  in 
which  the  new  life  did  not  stand  out  in  a  complete  an- 
tithesis to  the  old.  Once  he  had  been  wholly  given  over 
to  an  obedience  to  tradition ;  now  he  was  emancipated 
from  tradition  and  lived  by  the  Spirit.  Once  he  had 
been  the  victim  of  a  narrow  racial  exclusiveness;  now 
he  held  and  practised  an  apostolate  the  range  of 
which  was  as  wide  as  the  world.  This  enlargement 
was  due  to  the  invasion  of  his  own  spirit  by  another 
Spirit,  and  the  occasion  of  this  invasion  was  his  first 
contact  with  Christ. 

It  may  be  laid  down  as  a  settled  principle  that  Paul's 
own  personal  experience  is  the  key  to  all  his  teaching. 
In  his  own  soul  he  saw  forces  at  work  which  he  con- 


i88       THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

ceived  rightly  to  be  at  work  everywhere.  There  is  a 
deep,  fundamental  identity  of  method  and  aim  in  all 
God's  work,  whether  in  the  single  soul  or  in  the  life 
of  a  nation  or  in  the  universe.  You  will  find  this  prin- 
ciple working  out  in  that  parallel  which  Paul  makes  in 
Galatians :  "  God  sent  forth  His  Son,  born  of  a 
woman  " — i.e.  into  the  world ;  but  God  also  "  sends 
forth  the  Spirit  of  His  Son  into  our  hearts,"  The 
principle  is  that  God  is  sending  forth  His  Son ;  and  the 
principle  applies  to  the  macrocosm  and  the  microcosm, 
to  the  great  world  and  to  the  little  soul. 

If  there  was  one  thing  that  Paul  was  sure  of,  it 
was  that  the  whole  creation  is  moving  to  "  some  far- 
off  divine  event."  The  idea  underlies  and  colors 
his  thought,  and  it  not  infrequently  finds  articulate 
expression.*  To  him  history  was  not  an  aimless, 
fluctuating  movement.  It  was  a  purposeful  process, 
with  a  definite,  determinate  end.  The  life  of  hu- 
manity is  not  the  sport  of  a  blind,  reckless  fate,  but  the 
unfolding  of  a  purpose,  the  working  out  of  an  inten- 
tion. The  direct  and  immediate  agent  of  this  process 
is  Christ.  He  is  God's  emissary  Who  is  at  work  in 
the  affairs  of  men.  Who  will  continue  to  work  until 
He  has  subdued  their  confusion  and  won  them  into  a 
perfect  harmony. 

But  this  philosophy  of  history  was  the  reflex  of 
Paul's  own  inner  history;  and  the  coming  of  Christ 
began  an  epoch  of  universal  history  as  it  had  begun 
an  epoch  in  Paul's  own  life.  In  his  conversion  he  saw 
an  event  which,  translated  into  terms  of  universal 
history,  corresponded  to  that  transformation  of  the 
course  of  the  world  which  had  been  effected  by  the 
♦  E.  g.  in  Eph.  i.  9. 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      189 

coming  of  Christ.  What  began  to  happen  to  Paul  on 
the  road  to  Damascus  began  to  happen  to  the  whole 
world  in  the  manger  at  Bethlehem. 

It  is  only  necessary  to  recall  the  terms  in  which  Paul 
describes  the  fact  of  his  conversion  and  his  subsequent 
experience,  to  realize  that  the  analogy  is  deliberate  and 
intentional.  "  It  pleased  God  to  reveal  His  Son  in 
me,"  as  it  had  pleased  Him  to  reveal  His  Son  in  the 
world.  He  travails  in  pain  until  "  Christ  is  formed 
within  "  his  foolish  Galatian  children.  He  describes 
his  own  life  as  "  Christ  that  liveth  in  me."  This  is 
entirely  in  keeping  with  the  whole  apostolic  conviction 
that  Christ  was  still  in  the  world,  finishing  the  things 
He  had  begun  to  do  and  to  teach.*  The  Spirit  of 
Christ,  Who  was  Paul's  life,  is  also  the  life  of  the 
world.  The  thing  that  happened  on  a  small  scale  in 
Paul's  life  at  his  conversion,  happened  on  a  large 
scale  to  the  world  in  the  appearance  of  Jesus  Christ. 
In  both  cases  the  course  of  previous  history  was  not 
continued,  but  reversed.  The  nature  of  the  transfor- 
mation must  be  appreciated  if  we  are  to  discover  the 
character  of  the  impulse  which  effected  it. 

In  order  to  grasp  the  whole  extent  of  the  trans- 
formation, we  must  interpret  it  in  a  wider  light  than 
Paul's  own  conversion.  We  can  perhaps  best  do  it 
by  collating  Paul's  conversion  with  that  of  Augustine. 
The  pre-Christian  life  of  Paul  was  a  struggle  after 
righteousness.  It  was  a  stiff  grim  fight  for  a  certain 
personal  attainment  in  character  and  conduct.  But  he 
fought  the  fight  with  his  own  arm  and  his  own  weap- 
ons. He  sought,  to  use  words  he  applied  to  the  Gala- 
tians,  to  become  perfect  through  the  flesh.  It  was  the 
*  Acts  i.  I. 


190        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

growing  sense  of  failure,  which  he  tried  in  vain  to 
swamp  by  a  vehemence  of  hate  and  a  ferocity  of  per- 
secution, that  stood  out  as  the  one  sure  thing  in  his 
experience.  Then  when  he  was  near  despair,  Christ 
came  upon  him  and  revolutionized  his  life,  turned  it 
upside  down,  and,  instead  of  seeking  perfection 
through  the  flesh,  he  surrendered  to  the  Spirit;  that 
indwelling  Spirit  which  bound  up  his  broken  life 
again,  became  a  new  unifying  vital  principle  within 
him,  gathering  up  his  whole  life  into  the  one  obedi- 
ence, and  working  out  in  him  in  increasing  Christlike- 
ness  of  moral  character. 

Augustine,  unlike  Paul,  lived  a  life  of  vice,  a  life  of 
carnal  satisfaction.  He  lived  "  in  the  flesh  "  in  the 
bad  sense.  Christ  came  upon  him  also,  and  trans- 
formed his  life.  There  was  a  definite  break  with 
the  past.  A  new  tendency,  a  new  moral  impulse  in- 
vaded his  soul;  and  whereas  he  once  had  lived  the 
fleshly  carnal  life,  he  henceforth  lives  a  life  of  self- 
discipline,  austerity,  and  of  moral  increase. 

The  past  of  Paul  was  as  different  as  possible  from 
the  past  of  Augustine.  The  one  lived  a  life  of  striving 
after  goodness,  the  other  a  life  of  sensuality.  But 
both  lived  by  their  own  powers,  subordinated  in  the 
one  to  clean,  in  the  other  to  unclean  ends;  in  the  one 
given  over  to  a  striving  after  righteousness,  in  the 
other  given  over  to  a  ministry  of  vice.  In  the  case  of 
both  it  was  a  quest  for  a  personal,  individual  satisfac- 
tion— very  different,  of  course,  in  kind;  in  both  there 
was  a  transformation,  and  this  transformation  landed 
both  alike  in  the  same  life,  endowed  them  with  the 
same  ideals,  bore  in  both  the  same  fruit  of  service,  self- 
abnegation,  holiness,  and  love. 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      191 

But  in  both  cases  the  transformation  was  wrought 
by  something  from  without.  It  may  be  that  the  de- 
mand and  the  necessity  for  the  transformation  de- 
veloped from  the  internal  conditions  in  either  case — • 
in  the  consciousness  of  moral  failure  in  the  one  case; 
in  a  repletion,  a  satiety  which  did  not  satisfy,  in  the 
other  case.  But  this  alone  would  only  produce  a 
deadlock.  The  transformation  could  only  be  accom- 
plished by  the  invasion  of  their  lives  by  a  force,  a 
spirit,  a  principle  from  without. 

Now,  there  was  a  side  of  the  world's  life  which 
looked  for  the  best  things.  The  Greek  had,  according 
to  Paul,  long  sought  after  God  if  haply  he  might  find 
Him.  But  he  sought  Him  by  his  own  power,  and 
therefore  he  sought  Him  vainly.  "  The  world  by  wis- 
dom found  not  God."  It  built  its  altars  to  an  un- 
known God.  In  despair  it  was  giving  up  the  quest. 
By  Paul's  time  Greek  thought  had  declined  into  a  thin 
and  futile  speculation,  the  mere  ghost  of  the  mighty, 
massive  thinking  of  the  past.  Now  it  was  merely 
arguing  round  in  a  vicious  circle  from  which  it  could 
not  escape.  Side  by  side  with  it,  the  evidence  of  its 
failure,  lay  the  practice  of  a  polytheistic  religion,  the 
superstitions  of  which  stultified  the  whole  tradition  of 
severe  and  strong  intellectual  discipline  which  had  been 
the  glory  of  Greece.  Greek  thought  stopped  on  the 
threshold.  The  Jew  sought  diligently  after  personal 
righteousness,  but  he  sought  it  by  his  own  power. 
The  fulfilment  of  the  thousand  and  one  requirements 
of  the  Law  constituted  for  him  the  end  of  his  ex- 
istence. But  the  more  he  fulfilled  it  the  more  he 
despaired  of  ever  fulfilling  it,  and  he  came  little  by 
little  to  substitute  a  ceremonial  externalism  for  that 


192        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

moral  liability  the  sense  of  which  was  the  high- 
water  mark  of  his  religious  development.  This 
failed  to  satisfy  the  best  spirits  of  Israel,  and  we  see 
them  again  and  again  breaking  away  from  the  out- 
ward in  a  passionate  struggle  for  the  inward,  which 
only  a  few  managed  to  realize,  and  they  only  partially. 
Both  on  the  side  of  the  spiritual  and  on  the  side  of 
the  moral  requirements  of  the  human  soul,  the  long 
quest  of  the  world  had  proved  a  failure.  The  world 
was  settling  down  to  a  weariness  and  a  despair  of 
advance  which  expressed  itself  more  and  more  in  a 
degenerate  speculation  which  got  nowhere,  and  a  ritual 
religiosity  which  exerted  no  moral  discipline  on  its 
professors.  The  world  had  failed  to  find  the  best 
things. 

There  was,  however,  another  side  of  the  world's 
life  which  simply  spent  itself  upon  immediate  material 
and  physical  satisfaction,  and  one  need  only  turn  to 
Paul's  first  chapter  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans  to 
know  what  kind  of  world  that  was.  It  was  steeped  in 
carnality;  soaked  in  an  increasing  bestiality;  held  in 
the  grip  of  a  moral  *'  rot  "  which  seemed  to  threaten 
some  swift  and  overwhelming  dissolution. 

That  is  to  say,  we  have  a  world  of  which  Paul's 
life  is  the  type,  another  of  which  Augustine's  is  the 
type.  Both  worlds  needed,  as  Paul  and  Augustine 
needed,  the  same  remedy.  Both  needed  transforma- 
tion. Neither  could  produce  a  new  world  out  of  its 
own  resources.  Both  were  bankrupt,  both  were  ex- 
hausted, the  note  of  both  was  degeneracy.  The  world, 
above  all  things,  needed  a  conversion.  It  needed  to  be 
turned  upside  down,  like  Paul  and  Augustine.  As 
some  power  from  without  was  needed  to  do  it  for  Paul 


JESUS  AND  THE  ETERNAL  CHRIST      193 

and  Augustine,  so  some  power  from  without  was 
needed  to  do  it  for  the  world.  It  was  in  order  to  ac- 
complish on  the  plane  of  history  what  was  accom- 
plished in  the  souls  of  Paul  and  Augustine,  that  in  the 
fulness  of  the  time  God  sent  forth  His  Son,  born  of 
a  woman.  Jesus  Christ  was  the  force  from  without, 
the  new  power,  the  new  principle  sent  to  transform  the 
world.  Bethlehem  was  the  beginning  of  the  conver- 
sion, of  the  regeneration  of  the  world.  In  the  life  of 
Christ  the  ordered  course  of  history  was  broken,  a 
new  thing  came  into  the  world,  a  new  work  was  begun 
in  the  world.  Out  of  an  intellectually  and  morally 
bankrupt  world,  by  this  new  work,  a  new  world  was 
to  arise — a  new  spiritual  world,  rich  in  abundant  and 
increasing  intellectual  and  moral  satisfactions. 

For  the  explanation  of  Jesus  and  all  that  He  has 
meant  to  the  world,  we  must  still  go  back  to  Paul.  The 
immense  and  inexhaustible  spiritual  impulse  which  en- 
tered the  world  with  Jesus  requires  something  to  ac- 
count for  it  far  more  radical  than  any  theory  of  de- 
velopment can  ever  compass.  There  was  an  intru- 
sion of  something  so  vast,  so  incalculable  in  the  world's 
life  that,  whether  we  grasp  all  its  implications  or  not, 
whether  it  confounds  our  philosophical  presupposi- 
tions or  not,  the  only  satisfying  account  of  the  matter 
is  that  "  the  Word  became  flesh,  and  dwelt  among  us." 


XVII 

LIFE  AT  THE  CROSS 

I.  XT  is  difficult,  in  view  of  the  surpassing  unique- 
I  ness  of  the  personality  of  Jesus  and  of  the  char- 
-*-  acter  and  result  of  His  impact  upon  the  world, 
to  escape  from  a  doctrine  of  Incarnation.  That  there 
was  something  unusual,  outside  the  ordinary  natural 
and  historical  processes,  in  the  circumstances  which 
produced  the  Christ  is  evident  from  the  early  accept- 
ance of  the  doctrine  of  the  Virgin  birth.  It  was  impos- 
sible to  regard  Him  as  a  normal  product  of  the  forces 
which  were  accountable  for  other  individuals.  He 
could  not  be  fitted  into  any  ordinary  category;  and  even 
if  the  critical  pruning-hook  does  cut  away  some  of  the 
unhistorical  matter  which  has  gathered  round  the  his- 
torical Jesus,  the  episode  in  history  of  which  He  was 
the  central  figure,  by  reason  of  its  consequences  to  the 
world,  of  the  new  impulse  which  it  introduced  and 
which  is  not  yet  exhausted,  still  prevents  us  from 
overthrowing  His  pedestal  and  ranking  Him  with  our 
chosen  heroes.  He  is  only  to  be  explained  by  postulat- 
ing a  unicjue  and  unparalleled  irruption  of  the  divine 
life  into  the  world  in  His  person  and  work.  This  was 
indeed  not  the  only  time  the  divine  life  broke  through 
the  crust  of  things.  It  had  filtered  through  from  the 
very  beginning  of  time;  and  there  were  many  occa- 
sions of  swift  and  dazzling  irruption  in  the  course  of 

194 


LIFE  AT  THE  CROSS  195 

history.  But  the  difference  between  Jesus  and  others 
is  the  difference  between  the  perfect  and  the  imperfect, 
between  the  complete  and  the  partial.  The  difference 
between  the  perfect  and  the  imperfect  is  not  a  differ- 
ence of  degree  but  a  difference  of  category;  and  this  is 
the  difference  between  Jesus  and  the  great  leaders  and 
teachers  of  mankind.  It  is  not  the  relative  difl'erence 
of  shades  of  light,  for  that  is  a  thing  that  can  be  meas- 
ured. The  difference  is  the  immeasurable  and  inde- 
finable difference  between  perfect  absolute  light  and 
light  that  is  relative — a  difference,  in  the  last  analysis, 
of  kind — that  is,  between  two  classes  of  light. 

It  was  inevitable,  therefore,  when  men  came  to  work 
out  credal  definitions  of  the  Person  of  Christ,  that 
they  should  put  Him  in  the  category  of  God,  which  is 
the  only  superhuman  category  we  have  any  knowledge 
of.  But  it  must  always  be  remembered  that  when  we 
speak  of  Jesus  as  God  we  are  using  a  term  of  which 
with  our  limitations  we  cannot  form  a  manageable  con- 
ception. It  presumes  that  we  can  define  deity — which 
we  cannot.  Our  confessional  statements  are  at  best  no 
more  than  approximations.  They  are  the  best  we  can 
do.  Words  are,  after  all,  only  symbols;  and  to  imagine 
that  we  can  capture  the  whole  mystery  of  Jesus'  ap- 
pearance in  the  world  into  a  phrase  or  a  collection  of 
phrases  is  to  have  too  great  faith  in  the  capacity  of 
language.  The  theologian  at  the  best  can  accomplish 
no  more  than  splendid  guesswork. 

In  divinity  and  love, 
What's  best  worth  saying-  can't  be  said. 

At  the  same  time  the  theologian  who  struggles  with 
words  in  order  to  compass  the  inwardness  of  Jesus  is 


196         THE  RENASCENGE  OF  FAITH 

far  nearer  reality  than  the  critic  who  proceeds  by 
writing  off  whatever  transcends  a  purely  human  quality 
in  Jesus.  Even  superstition  is  always  on  the  whole 
nearer  reality  than  scepticism.  There  is,  perhaps,  no 
more  futile  way  out  of  the  difficulty  which  the  problem 
of  Jesus  presents  than  that  which  insists  upon  regard- 
ing Him  primarily  as  a  teacher.  This  certainly  is  a 
short  and  easy  way  out  of  many  difficulties;  but  it  does 
no  sort  of  justice  to  the  historical  interpretations  of 
Jesus,  which  have  all,  with  one  accord,  contemplated 
Jesus  first  of  all  as  a  doer  rather  than  as  a  teacher,  and 
most  of  all  in  one  supreme  act. 

The  teaching  of  Jesus  is  hardly  more  than  an  inci- 
dent in  His  life;  and  we  are  to  treat  it  rather  as  a  com- 
mentary upon  Himself  than  as  the  point  and  substance 
of  His  mission  to  the  world.  There  was,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  much  that  was  not  new  in  the  teaching  of  Jesus. 
Endless  points  of  contact  have  been  discovered  between 
it  and  the  work  of  thinkers  and  moralists  and  religious 
teachers  of  surrounding  ages  and  lands.  But  this  does 
not  in  any  very  real  sense  impugn  the  uniqueness  of 
Jesus  even  as  a  teacher.  His  teaching  is  related  to  that 
of  those  from  whom  He  is  said  to  have  learnt  or  bor- 
rowed, just  as  a  nugget  of  gold  is  related  to  the  grains 
of  gold  in  the  sand  of  a  river.  But  even  if  the  orig- 
inality of  Jesus  as  a  teacher  were  to  be  as  heavily  dis- 
counted as  some  of  the  critics  would  have  us  believe  it 
ought  to  be,  the  problem  of  Jesus'  impact  on  the  world 
still  remains.  The  solution  of  that  problem  must  be 
discovered  in  the  person  of  Jesus,  for  the  unique  power 
of  His  teaching  (which  is  a  vastly  more  important 
matter  than  the  originality  of  its  content)  and  His 
influence  upon  history  derived  from  thence. 


LIFE  AT  THE  CROSS  197 

2.  But  the  impact  of  a  personality  upon  the  world 
consists  in  its  acts;  and  if  we  would  understand  the 
secret  of  a  given  personality  and  of  its  reaction  upon 
the  course  of  the  world,  we  must  study  it  in  its  char- 
acteristic activities.  It  generally  happens  that  there 
are  in  a  man's  life  one  or  two  supreme  acts  in  which 
his  whole  being  is  summed  up.  Luther  is  most  of  all 
Luther  at  Worms ;  and  Jesus  is  supremely  Jesus  on  the 
Cross.  For  the  Cross  is  just  Jesus  in  the  whole  inmost 
truth  of  His  entire  being,  gathered  up  in  one  complete 
definitive  act. 

Quite  apart  from  any  doctrinal  view  of  the  person 
of  Jesus  Christ,  human  judgment  has  ascribed  to  the 
Cross  an  easy  primacy  among  the  greatest  moral 
achievements  of  history.  It  shows  us  man  at  his  high- 
est. It  is  the  ethical  high-water  mark.  It  is  the  fit 
summation  of  His  way  of  life,  the  natural  and  inevi- 
table climax  of  the  native  tendencies  of  His  person- 
ality. Jesus  could  not  have  escaped  the  Cross,  and  He 
knew  it.  He  knew  He  "  must  suffer  many  things  and 
be  crucified."  There  was  no  other  goal  in  the  world 
for  the  driving  force  which  worked  in  Him. 

3.  As  a  matter  of  history,  Jerusalem  was  the  one 
city  on  earth  where  the  perfect  good  and  the  supreme 
evil  could  meet  face  to  face.  There  were  cities  of 
viler  sin  than  Jerusalem;  but  none  of  greater.  For 
Jerusalem's  traditional  sin  had  been  the  sin  against  the 
light :  not  merely  was  it  sin  in  the  face  of  the  light;  it 
was  active  opposition  to  the  light.  It  killed  the 
prophets  and  stoned  those  that  were  sent  to  it.  Yet, 
because  of  the  peculiar  discipline  of  the  Jewish  nation, 
the  supreme  holiness  appeared  in  the  world  in  the  habit 


198         THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

of  Hebrew  flesh.  Salvation  was  of  the  Jews;  they  had 
been  in  the  main  and  central  line  of  religious  develop- 
ment; and  it  was  from  the  seed  of  David  that  "the 
Light  of  the  world  "  emerged.  Once  more  Jerusalem 
sinned  against  the  light;  and  this  time  against  the  per- 
fect light. 

It  is  impossible  to  read  the  story  of  the  closing 
episodes  of  our  Lord's  life  without  hearing  the  tramp 
of  a  thousand  hidden  forces.  The  crisp,  almost  bald 
narrative  no  more  than  suggests  the  terrible  dimensions 
of  the  tragedy  and  the  triumph  which  were  enacted. 
During  the  Armenian  atrocities  of  1896,  the  Tompkyns 
verses  in  the  Daily  Chronicle  seemed  to  get  nearer  the 
heart  of  the  matter  than  the  prose  accounts  of  the 
massacres;  and  one  terrible  line  remains  in  the  mem- 
ory :  "  Hell's  burning  through  in  Turkey."  That  is  the 
kind  of  impression  which  is  made  by  the  welter  of 
passion  and  intrigue  and  bigotry  and  hate  which 
seethed  and  surged  around  Jesus  during  His  last  hours. 
It  seemed  as  though  the  whole  power  of  evil  had  gath- 
ered itself  up  for  one  last  assault  upon  the  power  of 
good,  and  had  fallen  upon  Jesus.  There  is  a  strong 
cosmic  overtone  throughout  the  whole  episode. 

There  can  be  little  question  that  the  cry  of  derelic- 
tion on  the  Cross,  "  My  God,  My  God,  why  hast  Thou 
forsaken  Me?"  marks  the  climax  of  Jesus'  passion. 
Already,  in  the  garden,  He  had  seen  the  approach  of 
His  loneliness;  and  it  is  the  most  probable  explanation 
of  the  agony  in  Gethsemane  that  it  was  a  prevision  of 
the  hiding  of  His  Father's  face  which  shook  Him  like 
a  reed  in  a  storm.  He  had  lived  in  the  most  intimate 
fellowship  with  God,  and  He  was  about  to  suffer  a 
rupture  of  that  fellowship.     He  shrank  from  it  in  a 


LIFE  AT  THE  CROSS  199 

tempest  of  "strong  crying  and  tears";  yet  He  came 
out  of  the  struggle  ready  even  for  that.  And  on  the 
Cross  He  endured  it. 

Now,  it  is  significant  that  the  martyrs  of  Christian 
history  have  been  most  keenly  conscious  of  the  divine 
presence  in  the  supreme  hour  when  Jesus  felt  that  it 
was  withdrawn.  This  immediately  puts  His  death  in 
a  different  category,  and  starts  a  question  which  must 
presently  be  answered,  and  which  is  indeed  raised  by 
other  related  circumstances.  This  in  itself  indicates 
an  inward  struggle  of  some  unique  kind  in  which  the 
very  faith  of  Jesus  was  being  challenged.  There  were 
forces  at  work  which  seemed  to  aim  at  breaking  His 
relation  to  God.  But  still,  even  in  dereliction,  the  cry 
was  "'  My  God,  My  God."  Even  the  cry  of  dereliction 
was  a  cry  of  faith.  In  that  awful  hour  the  faith  of 
Jesus  could  not  be  shaken.  And  if  that  means  any- 
thing, it  means  that  the  power  of  evil  broke  itself  when 
it  broke  upon  the  rock  of  Jesus'  faith. 

4.  For  consider  who  and  what  Jesus  conceived 
Himself  to  be.  It  can  hardly  be  doubted  now,  what- 
ever apocalyptic  associations  the  name  originally 
possessed,  that  Jesus'  assumption  of  the  title  "  Son 
of  Man "  reflected  a  conception  of  Himself  as  the 
embodiment  of  manhood,  as  the  representative  man,  a 
conception  which  is  justified  by  such  an  inquiry  into 
His  personality  as  we  engaged  in  in  the  previous 
chapter.  He  sees  the  race  gathered  up  in  Himself. 
He  conceives  Himself  to  be  the  incarnation  of  the 
immanent  spirit  of  humanity,  the  centre  of  a  great 
human  movement,  the  starting-point  of  a  new  phase 
of  human  development.    He  was  not  a  man,  so  much 


200        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

as  He  was  all  men.  The  supreme  distinction  between 
Polycarp,  say,  and  Jesus  is  that  Polycarp  died  because 
he  was  loyal  to  Jesus,  but  Jesus  died  because  He  was 
loyal  to  all  of  us  in  Himself.  It  was  not  a  local  and 
temporary  issue  which  was  at  stake;  not  a  question 
of  national  or  ecclesiastical  or  even  of  religious  prin- 
ciple. It  was  the  whole  life  of  humanity.  It  was  not 
the  Cross  of  a  man,  or  of  a  race,  but  of  a  world.  It  is 
this  circumstance  which  invests  the  Cross  with  that 
quality  of  timelessness  and  universality  which  makes  it 
still  a  living  issue.  Somehow  or  other  we  were  all 
involved  in  it.  We  look  back  upon  it  and  see  it  stand- 
ing out  like  some  lone  alp  above  the  hillocks  round 
about  it,  towering  far  away  above  the  highest  peaks 
of  historical  happening.  It  speaks  to  us  still  with 
a  personal  immediacy  and  directness  which  no  amount 
of  rationalizing  can  qualify. 

The  background  of  the  Cross  Is  not  Jerusalem,  but 
the  whole  world;  the  date  of  the  Cross  is  not  a  cer- 
tain day,  but  all  time. 

5.  We  must,  therefore,  endeavor  to  interpret  the 
Cross  with  reference  to  the  life  of  the  whole  race,  and 
particularly  by  way  of  its  ethical  implicates.  But  it 
should  be  remembered  that  the  ethical  aspects  of  the 
Cross  must  be  considered  in  the  light  of  the  new  ethical 
norm  which  Jesus  taught  and  His  life  embodied. 

Our  interpretations  of  the  Cross  have  been  too 
largely  dominated  by  the  Jewish  conception  of  sin,  in 
forgetfulness  of  the  fact  that  Jesus  had  already  de- 
clared the  traditional  moral  standards  to  be  inadequate. 
For  Jesus,  what  was  good  or  evil  was  not  determined 
by  legislative  enactments,  however  authoritative,  but 


LIFE  AT  THE  CROSS  201 

by  the  necessities  of  the  divine  life  in  man.  Whatso- 
ever hindered  the  divine  Hfe  in  man,  whether  it  be 
carnal  vice  or  an  outworn  tradition,  lay  on  the  one 
side  of  the  line;  whatsoever  helped  the  divine  life  lay 
on  the  other.  His  ethic  covered  the  whole  ground  of 
the  Mosaic  code  and  extended  far  beyond  it  into  re- 
gions which  no  external  code  could  ever  legislate  for. 
The  doctrine  of  divine  immanence  makes  obsolete 
the  old  notion  of  morality  as  a  legislative  requirement 
imposed  by  God.  It  can  only  be  held  in  its  undiluted 
form  on  the  basis  of  the  absolute  alterity  of  the  ulti- 
mate moral  authority.  The  conception  of  immanence 
requires  us  to  think  of  the  moral  demand  of  God  upon 
us  as  being  an  element  in  the  divine  purpose  of  self- 
fulfilment.  If  we  are  going  to  conceive  of  the  exist- 
ence of  a  personal  God  at  all,  we  are  compelled  to 
regard  all  His  activity  as  the  process  of  His  self-fulfil- 
ment. The  process  of  self-fulfilment  must  consist  in 
one  of  two  things :  either  an  arbitrary  aesthetic  satis- 
faction in  the  mere  business  of  getting  things  done  (in 
which  case  human  personality  seems  to  have  no  par- 
ticular use),  or  an  intelligent  fellowship  (as  the  exist- 
ence of  human  personality  seems  to  indicate).  But 
perfect  fellowship  implies  a  perfect  rapport  of  spirits, 
and  is  therefore  only  possible  under  moral  conditions. 
Just  as  water  seeks  and  finds  its  own  level,  so  the 
spiritual-moral  impulse  in  man  may  be  regarded  as  the 
endeavor  of  the  moral  nature  of  the  Creator  to  find 
its  own  level  in  His  creatures.  On  this  view,  "  Be  ye 
holy,  as  I  am  holy,"  is  at  bottom  a  pleading  rather 
than  a  behest.  It  has  not  behind  it  the  terror  of  the 
Law,  but  the  hunger  of  Holy  Love  to  find  its  own 
level  in  the  beloved. 


202        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

This  is  borne  out  by  the  fact  that  the  moral  sense 
in  man  is  not  a  static  thing,  a  mechanical  and  unchang- 
ing criterion.  It  has  a  certain  dynamic  quality.  It 
is  a  living  thing  within  us  which  grows,  not  only  in 
extent,  but  in  sensitiveness  and  authority — that  is,  on 
condition  that  we  give  it  room  to  grow.  To  thwart 
it  habitually  is  to  strangle  it.  Persistent  wrong-doing 
destroys  it.  To  obey  it  is  to  confirm  and  to  enlarge  it. 
The  more  we  obey,  the  more  exigent  it  becomes.  Its 
requirements  grow  higher  and  greater  continually.  It 
has  behind  it  a  vis  a  tergo  which  is  for  ever  pushing  it 
up  higher;  and  this  vis  a  tergo  is  wholly  inexplicable 
unless  we  assume  it  to  be  the  impulse  of  the  divine 
righteousness  operating  in  us.  The  moral  sense  in  us 
is  not  merely  the  mirror  of  the  divine  moral  nature; 
it  is  continuous  with  it.  The  moral  life  is  the  life 
grounded  and  deriving  its  driving  power  from  the 
moral  nature  of  God.  The  advance  and  ascent  of  the 
moral  sense  in  the  individual  and  in  the  race  is  simply 
the  water  of  God's  holy  love  forcing  itself  up  to  its 
own  level  in  mankind. 

It  was  as  the  result  of  the  effort  to  systematize  the 
varied  demands  of  the  moral  sense  amid  the  growing 
complexity  of  life  that  they  became  embodied  in  a  code 
of  legal  requirements.  The  Mosaic  law  and  the  code 
of  Hammurabi  are  alike  the  consequences  of  the  God- 
guided  endeavor  of  men  to  apply  the  light  of  the 
moral  sense,  so  far  as  they  then  saw  it,  to  the  condi- 
tions of  life  at  the  time.  But  the  imposition  of  a  legal 
form  upon  the  moral  requirements  of  God  led  to  what 
was  primarily  a  thirst  and  a  longing  on  the  part  of 
God  being  regarded  as  a  legal  liability  on  man's  part, 
to  be  enforced  by  judicial  means.    The  Law  was  not. 


LIFE  AT  THE  CROSS  203 

however,  on  this  account  a  misinterpretation  of  God's 
moral  demand  upon  us.  The  legal  was  the  only  cate- 
gory that  was  available;  and  had  the  legal  form  of  the 
moral  obligation  been  regarded  as  an  approximation 
merely,  possibly  little  harm  would  have  accrued.  But 
the  legal  form  introduced  a  certain  penal  element  into 
the  statement  of  the  divine  moral  ideal  for  man,  which 
did  not  necessarily  belong  to  it;  and  it  is  this  penal 
quality  (which  a  legislative  statement  of  moral  require- 
ments cannot  escape)  that  has  clouded  and  vitiated 
much  of  our  thinking  about  the  Cross.  Not  that  sin 
is  not  punished;  but  it  is  not  punished  by  stated  divine 
decree.  It  is  punished  by  reason  of  what  is  in  itself. 
The  principle  of  retribution  is  immanental  in  all  sin. 
There  is  a  law  of  moral  gravitation  which  secures  that 
every  transgression  and  disobedience  shall  receive  due 
recompense  of  reward.  The  moral  law  is  no  more 
vindictive  than  what  we  call  physical  law.  The  breach 
of  either  brings  its  inevitable  consequences,  but  there 
is  no  penal  process  involved. 

Now,  it  is  hardly  open  to  question  that  if  anything 
should  have  saved  us  from  introducing  penal  consid- 
erations into  our  interpretation  of  the  Cross,  the  whole 
tenor  of  Jesus'  ethical  teaching  should  have  done  so. 
In  the  fifth  chapter  of  Matthew's  Gospel  He  shows 
with  great  elaboration  the  entire  inadequacy  of  the 
traditional  statements  of  moral  obligation.  He  accepts 
the  impulse  which  lay  behind  the  Law  as  genuine  and 
divinely  originated,  but  shows  in  detail  how  that  same 
impulse  was  applicable  to  a  variety  of  circumstances 
and  contingencies  which  the  Law  did  not  provide  for. 
The  spirit  which  forbade  an  adulterous  act  forbade 
equally  an  adulterous  intention.    The  spirit  which  for- 


204        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

bade  murder  equally  forbade  the  anger  which  led  to 
murder,  and  the  offence  which  evoked  the  anger.  The 
spirit  which  limited  revenge  to  the  precise  dimensions 
of  the  offence,  applied  logically,  forbade  revenge  alto- 
gether; and  not  only  did  it  forbid  revenge,  but,  in 
addition,  it  forbade  resentment,  and  even  at  last  en- 
joined service  to  the  aggressor  along  the  very  lines  of 
his  aggression. 

All  this  goes  to  show  that  for  Jesus  righteousness 
lay  not  in  doing  this  or  abstaining  from  that,  but  in  the 
possession  and  expression  of  a  certain  spirit.  For  the 
law  without  He  substituted  the  law  within.  The  holi- 
ness and  the  love  which  constituted  perfect  righteous- 
ness, and  which  found  their  perfect  human  expression 
in  His  own  life,  are  the  natural  attributes  and  expres- 
sions of  a  true  inner  spirit.  Sin  is  that  which  opposes 
or  suppresses  this  inner  spirit. 

6.  This  same  inner  spirit  is  the  true  human  spirit. 
Nevertheless,  it  is  also  the  Divine  Spirit — or  at  least  it 
is  continuous  with  it.  Neither  here  nor  elsewhere  can 
the  line  be  drawn  which  parts  the  human  from  the 
divine. 

For  Mercy,  Pity,  Peace  and  Love 

Is  God  our  Father  dear, 
And  Mercy,  Pity,  Peace  and  Love 
Is  man  His  child  and  care. 

Then  every  man  in  every  clime 

Who  prays  in  his  distress 
Prays  to  the  human  form  divine, 

Love,  Mercy,  Pity,  Peace. 

This  Spirit  is  the  vis  a  tergo  which  has  caused  the 
advance  and  the  ascent  of  the  moral  sense  in  man.    It 


LIFE  AT  THE  CROSS  205 

was  the  Spirit  which  worked  in  the  prophets  and  the 
men  of  old  when  they  challenged  religious  institutions 
which  had  ceased  to  exercise  moral  discipline  and  when 
they  called  men  to  repentance.  It  is  the  Spirit  which 
in  all  ages  has  opposed  the  carnal  instincts'  in  men, 
and  has  delivered  men  from  the  tyranny  of  obsolete 
institutions. 

It  was  this  same  Spirit  which  broke  into  the  world 
and  in  one  short  episode  of  history  revealed  itself  in 
its  perfect  complete  expression  in  Jesus.  No  theory  of 
historical  development  can  account  for  its  irruption 
at  that  particular  moment.  It  appeared  in  a  form 
which  showed  the  absence  of  all  normal  human  limita- 
tions. Jesus  was  not  merely  primus  inter  pares.  His 
quality  is  unique  and  unshared.  Nothing  short  of  a 
doctrine  of  Incarnation  is  at  all  adequate  in  explanation 
of  it.    The  historical  Jesus  was  God-man. 

This  Spirit  attained  its  climax  on  the  Cross,  and  its 
triumph  in  the  unconquerable  faith  of  Jesus.  But  just 
because  the  Spirit  was  in  Jesus  rising  to  its  height  of 
perfection,  the  opposing  forces  mobilized  themselves 
and  gathered  in  battle  array.    And  then  there  was  that 

Death-grapple  in  the  darkness 
'Twixt  old  systems  and  the  Word. 

It  is  not  given  to  us  to  look  upon  the  battle  of  which 
the  inner  soul  of  Christ  was  the  field.  But  we  can  see 
its  elements  in  its  environment,  and  we  know  that  the 
essence  of  it  was  the  attempt  to  break  the  faith  of 
Jesus,  to  make  the  Son  of  Man  belie  the  Son  of  God, 
and  thereby  to  separate  God  and  man  for  ever.  It  was 
the  Armageddon  of  flesh  and  spirit.  So  it  is  that  the 
Cross  makes  right  and  wrong  stand  outright  and  clear 


2o6        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

in  their  true  colors.  On  the  one  hand  Jesus,  on  the 
other  the  welter  of  intrigue  and  blindness  which  had 
always  slain  the  prophets  and  had  opposed  the  light. 
The  perfection  of  Jesus  had  for  its  foil  the  saddest  tale 
of  human  frailty  and  impiety  that  history  records.  On 
the  one  hand  the  perfect  good,  on  the  other  the  sum- 
mation of  the  whole  world's  sin — there  can  be  no  mis- 
take about  them.  And  out  of  the  battle,  in  the  act 
and  article  of  death,  Jesus  proclaimed  His  victory: 
"  Father,  into  Thy  hands  I  commend  My  spirit."  His 
faith  was  unbroken  and  man  was  saved  to  God.  It 
was  the  triumph  of  the  Spirit,  the  defeat  of  the  flesh; 
and  it  secured  for  good  and  all  the  primacy  of  the 
Spirit  in  the  affairs  of  men. 

7.  The  Cross  embodies  in  the  idiom  of  history  the 
characteristic  activity  and  experience  of  the  Universal 
Spirit,  and  is  therefore  a  revelation  of  the  measure 
and  way  of  the  spiritual  life  in  man.  It  becomes  a 
criterion  which  cleaves  humanity  from  top  to  bottom. 
It  is  indeed  an  "  epitome  of  the  world."  On  the  one 
hand  are  those  who  have  committed  themselves  to  the 
way  of  the  Cross;  on  the  other,  those  who  are  sworn 
to  a  fleshly  allegiance.  The  Cross  comes  to  every  man 
with  a  challenge;  and  there  is  no  escape  from  the 
response.  The  late  George  Tyrrell,  in  a  letter  written 
before  one  of  his  controversies  with  his  ecclesiastical 
superiors,  said,  "  How  glad  one  would  be  to  get  out  of 
it  all !  but  there  is  that  strange  Man  on  His  Cross  Who 
drives  me  back  again  and  again."  There  is  a  brother- 
hood of  the  Cross  in  the  world,  which  is  made  of  men 
who  have  "  been  crucified  with  Christ,"  and  who  feel 
the  constraint  of  the  Cross  as  a  present,  immediate,  and 


LIFE  AT  THE  CROSS  207 

irresistible  reality.  The  Cross  is  not  only  to  them  a 
revelation  of  an  ideal,  but  they  are  seeking  to  translate 
it  into  the  terms  of  their  own  life.  And  the  world  is 
made  up  of  just  two  classes — these  and  the  rest.  They 
are  men  in  whom  the  Spirit  is  doing  within  the  dimen- 
sions of  their  human  nature  His  own  perfect  work, 
liberated  from  the  qualifications  and  hindrances  of  the 
flesh,  and  who  find  in  the  Cross  at  once  the  secret  and 
the  goal  of  life.  They  live  in  "  the  fellowship  of  His 
sufferings,"  to  make  up  what  is  lacking  in  the  afflictions 
of  the  Christ.  By  their  life  and  work  and  sacrifice  they 
perpetuate  the  Cross.  The  historical  Calvary  becomes 
super-historic  and  universal  in  their  lives  and  work, 

8.  It  would  be  idle  to  imagine  that  any  single  line 
of  thought  will  enable  us  to  wrest  from  the  Cross  its 
entire  mystery;  and  the  fact  that  it  has  challenged  the 
best  human  thought  from  its  own  day  to  ours  without 
yielding  up  a  wholly  satisfying  interpretation  of  itself 
suggests  that  it  contains  a  concentration  of  reality  and 
experience  which  no  other  episode  in  history  even  re- 
motely approaches.  It  is  not  proposed  in  these  pages 
to  essay  a  theological  account  of  the  Cross;  rather, 
more  modestly,  is  it  proposed  to  suggest  a  mode  of  ap- 
proach. When  Mr.  R.  A.  S.  Macalister  was  exploring 
the  mound  of  Gezer,  he  did  not  set  out  by  uncovering 
the  mound.  He  dug  a  deep  trench  across  the  mound, 
and  as  the  trench  sank  down  through  successive  layers 
of  the  debris  which  had  been  deposited  during  each 
stage  of  the  city's  existence  he  was  able  to  gather 
materials  for  the  reconstruction  of  the  social  and  some 
of  the  political  history  of  the  place.  At  the  very  best 
we  can  never  hope  to  do  more  than  dig  a  trench  here 


2o8        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

and  there  across  the  area  of  reality  which  the  Cross 
represents.  But  even  before  we  start  our  digging  there 
is  one  fundamental  condition  which  must  be  observed. 

This  condition  may  be  stated  in  this  wise:  that  in 
order  to  understand  the  Cross  we  must  endure  it.  We 
cannot  grasp  its  significance  until  we  have  suffered 
upon  it. 

It  belongs  to  the  experience  of  the  saints  that  the 
forgiveness  of  sins  is  somehow  connected  with  the 
Cross.  In  some  way  the  Cross  represents  the  reaction 
of  human  sin  upon  God  and  what  it  costs  God  to  for- 
give sin.  It  is  a  commonplace  that  forgiveness  involves 
the  payment  of  a  price.  For  real  forgiveness  means 
that  one  accepts  and  endures  all  the  consequences  of 
an  offence  without  any  endeavor  to  avenge  it.  It  al- 
ways means  a  measure  of  self-limitation  and  of  sacri- 
fice. It  must  mean  no  less  to  God ;  but  we  can  never 
appreciate  what  it  does  mean  to  God  until  we  know 
what  it  means  to  us.  That  is  why  Jesus  taught  us  to 
pray,  "  Forgive  us  our  trespasses,  as  we  forgive  them 
that  trespass  against  us."  He  who  cannot  and  does 
not  forgive  can  never  understand  the  meaning  of  for- 
giveness. There  can  be  no  doctrine  of  the  Atonement 
for  an  unforgiving  soul,  no  understanding  of  the  Cross 
except  for  him  who  endures  the  like  cross  in  his  own 
little  life,  and  forgives  and  keeps  on  forgiving  even  as 
he  hopes  to  be  forgiven.  It  is  only  the  man  who  shares 
the  cost  of  forgiveness  with  God  who  can  penetrate  to 
a  true  understanding  of  the  Divine  forgiveness;  only 
he  who  knows  how  to  forgive  who  does  not  lose  his 
way  around  the  Cross. 

But  the  fellowship  of  Christ's  sufferings  entails  more 
than  this.    It  is  a  pleasant  and  a  glad  thing  to  know 


LIFE  AT  THE  CROSS  209 

that  we  have  the  forgiveness  of  our  sins  through  the 
Cross.  But  one  may  not  receive  forgiveness  through 
the  Cross  without  accepting  the  whole  Cross  in  all  its 
consequences.  We  cannot  pick  and  choose;  if  we  con- 
sent to  receive  the  benefits  of  the  Cross,  we  must  take 
up  the  whole  burden  of  life  at  the  Cross.  If  the  Cross 
reveals  to  us  what  it  means  to  God  to  forgive  sin,  it  no 
less  reveals  what  it  must  mean  to  us  if  we  are  to  con- 
quer sin  in  ourselves  and  in  the  world.  The  price  of  our 
warfare  is  a  Cross;  and  only  they  who  thus  fully  enter 
into  the  fellowship  of  Christ's  sufferings,  who  share 
with  Him  the  price  of  saving  the  world,  who  in  their 
own  bodies  make  up  "  what  is  lacking  of  the  afflictions 
of  Christ,"  possess  the  clue  to  the  meaning  of  the  Cross. 
Prior,  therefore,  to  the  theological  approach  to  the 
Cross  must  be  the  practical  acceptance  of  it  in  all  its 
implications.  It  is  to  be  accepted  not  only  as  the 
means  of  our  reconciliation  to  God,  but  as  the  badge 
and  the  livery  of  a  life  wholly  and  positively  reconciled 
to  God  not  only  through  the  remission  of  sins,  but  in 
the  perfect  harmony  of  an  obedient  and  surrendered 
will.  It  must  be  accepted  as  the  symbol  of  the  inevita- 
ble fortune  of  a  thoroughgoing  spiritual  life  in  a  world 
of  sense.  It  is  the  certain  lot  of  those  who  set  out  to 
overcome  the  world.  It  is  not  only  a  guarantee  of 
pardon,  but  a  principle,  a  law,  and  a  consequence  of  a 
sound  and  radical  Christian  life.  Perhaps  it  is  due  to 
the  fact  that  we  have  neglected  or  overlooked  this 
practical  approach  to  the  Cross  that  we  have  as  yet 
reached  no  satisfying  and  complete  doctrine  of  the 
Cross.  At  least  it  is  true  that  we  shall  not  enter  into 
its  inmost  mystery  until  we  come  to  it  in  this  way. 


XVIII 

THE  FELLOWSHIP  OF  THE  CROSS 

I.   y^HRISTIAN  folk  have  become  so  habituated 
I  to  the  thought  of  the  Cross  that  it  escapes 

^"^  them  ahnost  altogether  what  violence  it  did 
to  the  conventions  and  prejudices  of  the  first  century. 
It  ran  athwart  all  the  orthodox  idioms  of  religion  and 
philosophy;  it  bewildered  the  Jew  and  provoked  the 
Greek  to  scornful  impatience. 

Some  time  ago  there  were  exhibited  in  London  a 
number  of  paintings  by  men  whom  the  art  critics  call 
Post-Impressionists.  Art  has  its  own  traditions,  its 
own  conventional  idioms,  its  own  orthodoxy  of  symbol 
and  device  for  producing  its  characteristic  effects;  and 
these  may  vary  from  age  to  age.  In  art,  as  elsewhere, 
the  heresy  of  to-day  becomes  the  orthodoxy  of  to- 
morrow. Each  age  becomes  habituated  to  its  own 
artistic  idiom;  and  these  constitute  the  measure  of 
artistic  truth  for  those  of  us  who  have  or  pretend  to 
have  a  kind  of  acquaintance  with  art.  In  the  placid 
confidence  of  my  own  artistic  orthodoxy,  I  went  to  the 
Post-Impressionist  exhibition,  and  found  my  whole 
universe  turned  upside  down.  I  was  first  bewildered, 
then  affronted.  I  felt  that,  if  these  pictures  represented 
the  real  truth  of  art,  I  had  hitherto  been  mad,  living 
in  a  mad  world;  but  if  the  world  I  lived  in  was  sane, 
then  these  pictures  were  the  work  of  madmen.    Their 

3IO 


THE  FELLOWSHIP  OF  THE  CROSS    211 

whole  spirit  and  conception  were  violently  and  frankly- 
opposed  to  anything  I  had  ever  learned  to  conceive  of 
as  the  measure  of  truth  in  art,  A  little  application 
helped  to  clear  matters  up  somewhat,  and  I  began  to 
see  that  in  their  own  particular  fashion  these  men  were 
endeavoring  to  realize  a  quite  definable  ideal.  But 
the  process  by  which  I  reached  this  conclusion  was  like 
learning  a  new  language,  a  new  idiom  of  thought.  Just 
because  I  could  not  find  a  place  all  at  once  for  Post- 
Impressionism  in  my  scheme  of  ideas,  my  first  impulse 
was  to  write  it  down  as  mere  madness. 

So  the  Greek  and  the  Jew  failed  to  fit  the  Cross 
into  their  accepted  systems.  It  shocked  the  Jew  and 
insulted  the  intelligence  of  the  Greek.  Before  they 
could  make  head  or  tail  of  it  they  had  to  learn  a  new 
language,  new  idioms  of  thought  and  speech.  Paul 
helped  them  in  a  measure  by  endeavoring  to  translate 
the  Cross  into  the  conventional  speech  of  current  reli- 
gion and  philosophy;  but  in  the  process  he  transformed 
or  modified  the  connotation  of  the  very  words  which 
he  used.  The  Cross  was  a  new  thing  in  the  world,  and 
it  had  to  create  its  own  particular  idiom,  both  of 
thought  and  speech.  It  was  impossible  to  attach  the 
Cross  in  a  convincing  and  reasonable  way  to  any  sys- 
tem of  thought  or  religion  in  the  ancient  world.  It 
was  a  profound  and  thoroughgoing  contradiction  of 
all  their  characteristic  tendencies.  The  Greek  argued, 
"  If  I  am  in  the  succession  of  truth  as  the  philosophers 
have  taught,  then  this  new  teaching  must  be  madness." 
The  Jew  added,  "If  this  teaching  represents  the  truth 
of  God,  then  all  the  traditions  of  my  people  are  so 
much  illusion  and  error."  It  is  not  difficult  to  foresee 
what  the  next  step  in  the  argument  would  be  in  either 


212        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

case.  The  Jew  was  not  prepared  to  surrender  his 
religious  traditions,  nor  the  Greek  his  philosophical 
inheritance;  so  the  one  ruled  the  Cross  out  of  account 
as  an  offence  to  religion,  and  the  other  as  an  affront  to 
reason. 

Mr.  Bernard  Shaw,  in  his  introduction  to  "  Major 
Barbara,"  expresses  the  opinion  that  "  the  central 
superstition  of  Christianity  is  the  salvation  of  the 
world  by  the  gibbet,"  It  is  hard  to  say  whether  this 
is  the  judgment  of  a  Greek  or  a  Jew;  but  it  is  quite 
easy  to  see  that  it  is  the  judgment  of  a  man  who  has 
not  learnt  the  idiom  of  the  Cross,  and  who  imagines 
that  the  Salvation  Army  dialect  represents  the  prevail- 
ing speech  of  Evangelicalism.  The  misunderstanding 
of  the  Cross  is  due  in  great  measure  to  the  inadequate 
and  frequently  unethical  way  in  which  it  has  been  pre- 
sented; and  the  critic  does  not  think  it  worth  while  to 
pause  to  make  allowance  for  the  inherent  "  old-fogy- 
ism  "  of  human  nature  which  renders  it  a  slow  business 
to  translate  a  principle  into  the  broadening  terminology 
of  a  world  of  increasing  knowledge.  Crude  and  par- 
tial statements  of  the  Cross  are  not  easily  cast  off, 
and  it  is  no  use  impugning  the  adequacy  of  the  Cross 
for  to-day  because  there  are  still  some  people  who  pre- 
sent it  in  the  speech  of  yesterday.  The  Cross  is  a 
revelation  of  an  elemental,  primitive  human  ideal.  It 
carries  us  back  beyond  the  beginnings  of  things,  and 
shows  us  the  original  and  predestined  truth  and 
law  of  human  life.  In  the  Cross,  God  began  the 
world  over  again,  lifted  it  out  of  the  side  tracks  into 
which  it  had  drifted,  and  put  it  on  those  lines  of 
development  which  He  had  ordained  for  it  from  the 
very  first. 


THE  FELLOWSHIP  OF  THE  CROSS   213 


2.  It  reveals  a  curious  ignorance  of  modern  theo- 
logical tendencies  that  anyone  should  imagine  the  old 
penal  and  satisfaction  theories  of  the  Cross  still  hold 
the  field ;  and  it  would  reveal  a  still  more  curious  igno- 
rance of  the  nature  of  the  reaction  of  the  Cross  upon 
individuals  and  upon  the  world  were  anyone  to  sup- 
pose that  any  single  theory  of  the  Cross  would  be  an 
adequate  interpretation  of  it.  The  Cross  is  as  many- 
sided  as  life  itself;  but  at  the  heart  of  it  is  the  funda- 
mental law  that  sacrifice  is  the  supreme  condition  of 
peace  and  increase  of  life,  that  self -surrender  is  the 
secret  of  self-realization.  It  is  implicit  in  the  two 
positions  which  we  have  sought  to  establish  in  previous 
chapters — namely,  the  essential  continuity  of  human 
with  the  divine  life  (which  is  only  a  thinner  way  of  / 
putting  the  old  statement,  that  God  made  man  in  His  ' 
own  image),  and  the  plain,  primitive,  undifferentiated 
and  perfect  manhood  of  Jesus,  that  the  Cross  is  not 
only  a  revelation  of  a  human  ideal,  but  of  the  very  life 
of  God.  The  Cross  was  the  affirmation  of  the  principle 
that  the  very  deepest  truth  of  the  life  of  God,  trans- 
lated into  terms  of  history  in  the  Crucifixion,  was  to 
become  the  very  deepest  truth  of  the  life  of  man.  This, 
was  a  scandal  to  the  Jew,  for  to  him  life  was  power  J 
and  his  God  a  worker  of  signs;  foolishness  to  the 
Greek,  because  to  him  life  was  thought,  and  his  God 
the  repository  of  ideas.  In  the  same  way  the  Cross  is 
folly  to  the  modern  philosopher,  because  life  is  a 
process  of  natural  selection,  and  his  God  a  force  of 
evolution.  To  the  superior  person  it  is  an  offence 
because  his  God  is  a  genteel,  cultured,  aesthetic  deity, 
and  life  is  more  or  less  art.  To  the  average  man  the 
Cross  is  a  conundrum,  because  his  God  does  not  count, 


5. 


214        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

and  life  is  or  should  be  beer  and  skittles.  The  Cross 
cuts  across  all  these  modern  philosophies  and  ways  of 
life  as  sharply  and  as  summarily  as  it  does  across  the 
conventions  of  the  religious  Jew  or  the  intellectual 
Greek,  or  of  the  mixed  civilizations  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean seaboard  in  the  apostolic  age.  The  Shaws  and 
Nietzsches  miss  the  point  of  the  Cross  because  their 
philosophies  are  off  the  main  line  of  life.  They  have 
not  yet  learnt  that  their  "  little  systems  "  are  local 
irrelevant  froth  upon  the  broad  stream  of  life.  Life 
has  one  deep  law  and  one  deep  philosophy,  and  these 
are  the  law  and  the  philosophy  of  the  Cross.  From  age 
to  age,  amid  lengthening  vision,  broadening  outlook, 
deeper  insight,  the  speech  of  the  Cross  changes  its  dia- 
lect; it  makes  itself  plain  and  articulate  at  every  stage 
and  on  every  plane  of  life  in  such  terms  as  each  stage 
and  plane  can  understand.  Certainly  it  does  not  do  so 
without  a  struggle;  nor  does  it  do  so  in  a  day.  Never- 
theless, sooner  or  later  it  does  do  so,  and  the  Cross 
remains  in  every  age  a  super-historic,  never-ageing 
reality.  For  it  is  life — all  life  concentrated  into  one 
splendid  act. 

3.  But  it  was  not  in  the  plan  of  Jesus  that  this  act 
should  stand  alone  as  a  beacon  light.  Rather  did  He 
intend  it  to  be  the  beginning  of  a  conflagration.  The 
Cross  was  to  be  translated  into  men's  lives — not  singly 
alone,  but  in  a  community.  The  Church  was  the  com- 
munity founded  by  Christ  for  the  projection  and  per- 
petuation of  the  achievement  of  the  Cross  into  future 
ages.  From  the  Cross  the  stream  of  living  water  was 
to  flow  into  the  world;  and  the  Church  was  to  be  its 
channel.     To  the  Church  it  was  committed  to  carry 


THE  FELLOWSHIP  OF  THE  CROSS   215 

on  the  fight  of  the  spirit  against  flesh,  to  complete 
that  overcoming  of  the  world  of  which  the  Cross  is  at 
once  the  triumphant  beginning,  the  symbol  and  the 
promise. 

The  whole  course  of  the  discipline  which  the  first 
group  of  disciples  underwent  points  to  a  purpose  larger 
than  any  which  could  be  realized  in  a  world  whose 
whole  course  was  suddenly  to  be  turned  upside  down 
by  an  apocalyptic  coup.  It  was  not  unnatural  that  the 
enormous  strain  of  the  last  stages  of  our  Lord's  life 
should  have  caused  the  minds  of  His  followers  to 
swerve  from  the  groove  into  which  their  training  had 
led  them;  and  the  accumulation  of  apocalyptic  matter 
in  the  Gospel  records  around  the  final  stage  of  the  his- 
tory reflects  very  clearly  the  feeling  of  the  disciples 
that  they  were  coming  to  the  end  of  all  things.  This 
coincides  so  well  with  the  apocalyptic  feeling  then  gen- 
erally prevailing  that  it  was  a  whole  generation  and 
more  before  the  Christian  community  succeeded  in  out- 
living the  twist  which  these  circumstances  had  given  to 
it§  conception  of  its  own  significance.  When  the 
Church  began  to  settle  down  to  live  its  characteristic 
life  and  to  emerge  from  the  confusion  in  which  its 
mind  had  been  involved,  it  saw  more  and  more  clearly, 
as  is  evident  from  the  later  Pauline  teaching,  what  its 
function  in  the  world  was. 

It  would  have  spoken  little  for  the  foresight  of  Jesus 
if  He  had  been  content  to  leave  the  perpetuation  of 
His  mission  to  the  precarious  chances  of  a  loosely 
bound  company  of  followers;  and  it  is  impossible  to 
resist  the  feeling  in  reading  the  Gospels,  that  after  He 
had  recognized  the  futility  of  attempting  to  bring  in 
the  kingdom  of  God  through  the  channels  of  current 


2i6         THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

Judaism,  and  had  in  consequence  broken  definitely  with 
the  synagogue,*  His  chief  aim  was  to  build  up  a  com- 
munity of  disciples  by  whom  His  work  could  be  carried 
on.  It  is  as  though  one  who  had  been  carrying  on 
some  work  of  charity  or  public  utility,  and  had  fore- 
seen his  own  end,  should  gather  around  him  a  com- 
pany of  like-minded  men  to  whom  he  commits  the 
business  of  perpetuating  his  work,  and  whom,  mean- 
time, he  trains  for  it. 

It  would,  however,  be  idle  to  suppose  that  in  our 
Lord's  mind  this  work  of  continuation  was  to  be 
merely  the  promulgation  of  His  teaching.  On  the  con- 
trary, the  special  emphasis  which  He  lays  upon  His 
death  from  the  time  of  Peter's  confession  shows  that 
He  was  preparing  the  disciples  for  some  direct  re- 
demptive activity.  That  constituted  them  straightway 
into  a  body  of  an  entirely  different  character  from  any 
voluntary  association  of  men  joined  together  by  a 
common  interest  and  committed  to  some  common  pur- 
pose. The  Church  was  all  this;  but  it  was  a  good  deal 
besides.  It  is  significant  that  when  the  Church  began 
to  emerge  from  the  confusion  of  its  early  years  it 
learnt  to  conceive  of  itself  as  "  the  body  of  Christ."  It 
was  more  than  the  body  of  believers.  It  had  some 
profound  mystical  connection  with  Christ  which  put  it 
in  an  entirely  different  category  from  any  other  society 
or  community  of  men  in  the  world. 

4.  The  expression  "  the  body  of  Christ "  needs 
some  notice.  When  Paul  uses  the  term  Christ  it  is  in 
a  super-historic  sense.    It  does  not  stand  for  Jesus,  but 

*See  Burkitt,  "  The  Gospel  History  and  its  Transmission,"  pp. 
80  ff. 


THE  FELLOWSHIP  OF  THE  CROSS   217 

for  that  of  which  Jesus  was  the  perfect  embodiment 
and  manifestation  in  history.  We  may  say  (admitting 
the  theological  looseness  of  the  statement)  that  Jesus 
was  "  the  body  of  Christ,"  and  in  this  sense  Bishop 
Gore  is  right  when  he  speaks  of  the  Church  as  being 
the  projection  and  the  prolongation  of  the  Incarnation 
into  history.  Indeed,  no  other  conception  of  the 
Church  does  justice  to  the  facts.  Had  the  Church  been 
merely  a  voluntary  association  of  men  bound  together 
by  a  common  interest,  it  would  have  endured  the  his- 
toric fate  of  all  human  societies — "  They  have  their 
day,  they  cease  to  be  " — but  the  Church  has  persisted 
through  all  the  vicissitudes  of  history,  has  survived 
hostility  without  and  unfaithfulness  within,  and  still 
remains  the  great  outstanding  fact  of  Western  life. 
No  other  proof  of  this  is  necessary  than  the  circum- 
stance that  the  first  object  of  the  reformer's  criticism, 
the  first  object  of  sceptical  attack  or  rationalist  con- 
tempt, is  the  Church.  The  Church,  despite  its  frail- 
ties, remains  the  institution  the  least  negligible  by  the 
philosopher  and  the  politician,  by  the  critic  and  the 
iconoclast,  by  the  reformer — whether  of  society  or  of 
faith;  and  though  it  has  been  beset  behind  and  before 
by  candid  friends  and  overt  and  covert  enemies,  it  is 
here  still,  and  more  than  any  other  single  institution 
has  to  be  reckoned  with.  . 

Paul  speaks  of  the  Church  as  the  "  habitation  of 
God  by  His  Spirit."  We  are  sufficiently  accustomed 
to-day  to  the  idea  of  the  divine  immanence,  and  it  is 
likely  that  with  changing  and  less  mechanical  views  of 
evolution  we  shall  become  still  more  familiarized  with 
it.  God's  "  secret  presence  runs  through  all  creation's 
veins."     His  presence  sends  the  stars  in  their  wide 


2i8         THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

sweeping  courses,  orders  the  sun-rising  and  the  sun- 
setting,  and  breaks  out  in  the  multiform  life  of  plant 
and  animal.  The  student  of  history — when  he  is  de- 
livered from  the  bondage  of  mechanical  theories  of 
historical  process — may  trace  His  handiwork  in  the 
affairs  of  men.  But  God  indwells  the  Church  in  a 
peculiar  way.  He  is  in  the  Church  as  He  was  in  Christ, 
reconciling  the  world  unto  Himself.  His  presence  in 
the  world  is  creative,  His  presence  in  the  Church  is 
redemptive.  The  Church  is  in  the  world  the  active 
organ  of  the  redemptive  purpose  of  God  as  it  was 
revealed  and  wrought  out  in  Jesus. 

It  is  this  same  truth  which  underlies  the  conception 
of  "  the  body  of  Christ."  The  expression  is  intended 
to  convey  the  idea  of  a  vital  organic  relation  between 
Christ  and  the  Church.  The  Church  Is  His  body — not 
His  vicar  or  His  plenipotentiary,  but  the  organ  of  His 
activity,  an  inalienable  part  of  Himself.  The  Church 
is,  according  to  Paul,  "  the  fulness  of  Him  that  filleth 
all  in  all."  The  Church  is  to  be  on  earth  what  Christ 
is;  it  is  to  be  no  less  than  Christ  Himself  still  acting  on 
the  world  through  the  collective  Christian  conscious- 
ness and  energy.  Its  life  is  His  life;  its  blood  is  His 
blood;  its  nerve  and  its  muscle  move  at  His  dictation. 
It  is  to  be  nothing  other  or  less  than  the  prolongation 
and  the  projection  of  His  own  actual  Self  into  time 
and  into  this  world  of  living  men. 

One  is  quite  aware  that  to  a  rigorous  rationalism  all 
this  may  seem  obscurantist  and  reactionary;  but  one 
need  not  at  this  time  of  day  be  afraid  of  the  contemptu- 
ous names  that  reason  gives  to  things  it  cannot  under- 
stand. The  history  of  the  Church  is  charged  with 
episodes  and  Its  life  equipped  with  powers  which  must 


THE  FELLOWSHIP  OF  THE  CROSS   219 

for  ever  lie  outside  the  possibility  of  rational  explana- 
tion or  analysis.  The  Church  cannot  be  argued  out  of 
existence  by  a  process  of  a  priori  reasoning.  Its  history 
is  known;  and  the  one  stupendous  fact  of  its  historical 
continuity  is  alone  adequate  to  stultify  that  kind  of 
argument.  The  Church  is  an  organism  which  derives 
its  vitality  from  a  source  as  secret  as  the  source  of  all 
life.  Its  life  and  existence  do  not  depend  on  the  volun- 
tary interest  of  its  members;  it  derives  and  descends 
from  its  living  Head.  It  is  true  that  the  extent  and 
vigor  of  the  Church's  life  is  contingent  on  the  faith 
and  faithfulness  of  the  souls  which  are  its  cells;  but  the 
life  itself  does  not  originate  in  the  cells — it  only  passes 
through  them.  The  quality  and  health  of  the  cells  will 
determine  the  measure  of  the  life  that  comes  through 
them;  but  they  do  not  form  the  springs  of  the 
life.  The  life  of  the  Church  is  the  indwelling 
Christ, 

5.  This  life  must  express  itself  in  an  activity  of 
redemption.  It  is  not  the  business  of  the  Church  to 
control  or  to  change  the  opinions  of  men,  public  or 
private;  it  is  not  primarily  concerned  with  a  philosophy 
or  a  view  of  the  world.  It  is  charged  rather  with  a 
work  of  redemption;  and  by  the  inherent  power  which 
it  possesses  by  reason  of  its  organic  connection  with 
the  living  Christ,  it  constrains  the  wills  and  hearts  of 
men  into  the  faith  and  obedience  of  this  same  Christ. 
Not,  mark,  endeavoring  to  compel  them  first  of  all  into 
its  own  fellowship,  or  to  annex  them  to  its  own  mass; 
but  first  of  all  and  most  of  all  seeking  to  constrain 
men  into  faith  and  obedience  to  Christ — which  faith 
and  obedience  grafts  them  into  the  unity  and  fellowship 


220        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

of  those  who  are  Christ's,  which  constitutes  the  body 
of  Christ,  the  true  CathoHc  Church. 

n  the  Church,  then,  be  the  Body  of  Christ,  its  life 
should  be  a  reproduction  of  the  life  of  Christ;  and  as 
we  find  the  real  distinctiveness  of  the  life  of  the  Christ 
in  the  Cross,  so  the  Cross  must  be  reproduced  in  the 
life  of  the  Church.  The  Church,  that  is,  must  wage 
increasing  war  upon  the  world  round  about  it;  and  it 
must  pay  the  price  of  that  warfare.  It  must  bear  and 
endure  the  Cross.  Upon  Calvary  Jesus  made  an  effec- 
tive breach  in  the  ranks  of  the  powers  of  this  world, 
and  the  Church  exists  to  push  this  breach  farther,  to 
make  it  wider,  to  spread  its  own  frontiers  by  con- 
tinuously invading  the  territory  of  the  flesh.  Calvary 
has  become  the  centre  of  the  fight,  and  the  Spirit's  line 
of  battle  grows  in  ever-widening  circles  around  it;  and 
it  is  the  Church  which  mans  the  fighting  line. 

Hence  the  Cross  is  central  to  the  Church.  It  is  to 
be  the  theme  and  the  motif  of  its  life.  The  late  Dr. 
Parker  once  said,  truly,  that  "  Jesus  was  never  off  the 
Cross  ";  and  it  should  be  true  of  the  Church  that  it  is 
never  off  the  Cross.  It  is  called  to  make  up  what  is 
lacking  of  the  afflictions  of  Christ.  It  is  the  fighting 
force  of  the  Kingdom  of  the  Spirit;  and  the  cost  of 
the  warfare  is  a  perpetual  Cross.  "  The  blood  of  the 
martyrs  is  the  seed  of  the  Church,"  is  a  true  principle; 
but  it  needs  raising  to  larger  dimensions — the  blood 
of  the  Church  is  the  seed  of  the  Kingdom. 

6.  It  was  part  of  the  foresight  of  Jesus  that  He 
provided  a  simple  means  of  preserving  the  centrality 
of  the  Cross  for  the  Church.  That  is  the  rite  which 
we  call  the  Lord's  Supper. 


THE  FELLOWSHIP  OF  THE  CROSS   221 

Some  time  ago  it  was  given  to  me  to  keep  the  Pass- 
over in  the  home  of  a  rabbi  in  Jerusalem.  I  was  nat- 
urally very  much  outside  the  little  circle,  but  no  man 
with  the  rudiments  of  an  historical  sense  could  miss 
the  enormous  significance  of  the  observance.  Here  was 
this  little  family — one  of  innumerable  groups  that 
would  that  night,  with  the  setting  of  the  sun,  settle 
down  to  recall  that  wonderful  story  of  deliverance  in 
which  the  life  of  Israel  as  a  nation  began.  It  was  a 
great  religious  occasion,  but  it  was  supremely  the  sacra- 
ment of  nationality;  and  all  the  past,  with  its  strange, 
chequered  story  and  its  unrealized  hopes,  brought  its 
own  unutterable  power  into  the  observance.  This  is 
the  secret  of  the  national  preservation  of  a  homeless, 
scattered  nation — that  with  one  accord  throughout 
their  wide  dispersion  they  come  together  in  families  to 
this  simple  rite  of  commemoration,  to  which  the  proc- 
ess of  time  has  added  incalculable  momentum.  When 
Jesus,  foreseeing  the  days  to  come,  desired  so  to  pro- 
vide that  His  death  should  remain  as  central  to  the  life 
of  the  new  Israel  as  the  deliverance  from  Egypt  was  to 
the  life  of  the  old,  He  used  the  same  simple  expedient 
of  associating  His  death  with  a  common  domestic  act. 
The  Lord's  Supper  is  the  Lord's  wise  provision  for 
bringing  His  Church  back  again  and  again  to  its 
centre. 

This  is  not  to  say  that  the  Lord's  Supper  has  no 
further  significance.  That  would  be  to  limit  the  mean- 
ing of  the  Cross  itself.  But  it  does  indicate  very 
plainly  that  Jesus  intended  the  Cross  to  be  central  to 
the  life  of  the  Church,  to  be  its  constant  theme,  its  all- 
pervading  motif. 

Nor  does  this  mean  merely  that  the  Cross  is  to  be 


222        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

reproduced  in  the  ritual  or  symbolical  acts  of  the 
Church.  It  is  to  be  reproduced  in  the  whole  life  and 
experience  of  the  Church  as  a  whole;  and  the  rite  is 
simply  the  parable  of  the  experience.  The  doctrine  of 
the  Sacrifice  of  the  Mass  is  the  terminal  point  of  a 
by-path  development  of  Christian  theology;  and  the 
assumption  that  the  Cross  is  perpetuated  on  the  altar 
flies  in  the  face  of  the  plain  intention  of  the  upper 
room :  "  Do  this  in  remembrance  of  Me."  The  Cross 
must  be  reproduced,  not  in  this  or  that  element  of  the 
Church's  worship,  but  over  the  whole  area  of  the 
Church's  life;  and  what  is  needed  is  not  a  doctrine  of 
transubstantiation,  but  a  doctrine  of  perpetuation;  not 
that  the  elements  are  changed  on  the  altar,  but  that 
the  Cross  which  they  recall  is,  in  the  observance,  as- 
sumed afresh  as  its  burden  and  its  hall-mark  by  the 
Church  as  a  whole,  and  by  all  the  individual  souls 
which  constitute  it. 

The  Church  is  necessarily  always  the  Church  mili- 
tant; there  should  be  no  pause  in  its  warfare.  And 
warfare  means  suffering.  It  is  easy  to  see  that  over 
large  periods  and  areas  the  Church  has  lost  the  mili- 
tant spirit,  and  it  is  precisely  at  those  times  and  places 
that  the  Church  has  become  corrupt.  The  only  condi- 
tion on  which  it  can  escape  suffering  is  by  ceasing  to 
fight  or  by  acquiescing  in  the  ways  of  the  world,  by 
lowering  its  own  flag  or  by  compromising  with  the 
enemy.  The  Church  cannot  have  peace  without,  save 
by  ceasing  to  be  the  Church ;  at  least,  it  never  has  peace 
within  when  it  has  peace  without.  When  the  Church  is 
occupied  with  internecine  conflicts,  as  it  is  to-day,  it 
simply  means  that  it  has  ceased  to  use  its  weapons 
against  its  foes,  and  has  turned  them  upon  itself. 


THE  FELLOWSHIP  OF  THE  CROSS    223 

7.  While  we  are  thinking  of  the  present  life  of  the 
Church  it  is  possible  that  we  may  overlook  its  ultimate 
purpose.  We  speak  of  it  as  having  a  redemptive  pur- 
pose here  and  now ;  but  the  very  word  redemptive  sug- 
gests some  positive  goal. 

The  function  of  the  Church  is  to  produce  the  super- 
man. This  is  stated  plainly  by  Paul.  The  intention 
of  the  whole  various  economy  of  the  Church  is  that 
we  should  all  come  "  to  the  full-grown  man."  The 
positive  end  of  the  Church's  existence  in  time  is  the 
production  of  a  manhood  the  type  and  pattern  of  which 
is  the  manhood  of  Jesus.  The  redemptive  purpose  has 
a  great  positive  constructive  content — the  realization 
of  a  completely  spiritual  manhood.  So  it  is  that  the 
Church,  as  Dr.  Armitage  Robinson  has  said,  is  "  the 
nucleus  of  that  regenerated  human  society  which  is  to 
grow  out  of  the  recognition  and  realization  of  the  true 
human  constitution."  It  is  the  embodiment  and  organ- 
ization in  history  of  the  immanent  human-divine  spirit 
for  the  purpose  of  its  self-realization  in  time,  of  con- 
quering the  world  and  assimilating  it  to  itself.  It  is  the 
kingdom  of  the  Spirit  organized  for  work. 

"  Organized  " — but  from  within,  not  from  without. 
Its  life  has,  like  all  organic  life,  to  adapt  itself  to  the 
business  of  growing  in  the  world,  and  it  has  evolved 
from  within  itself  a  diversity  of  function  and  office. 
But  new  conditions  demand  new  adaptations;  and 
forms  of  Church  government,  which  are  the  most  ex- 
ternal of  the  Church's  furniture  of  adaptation,  are 
transitory  and  contingent.  Even  when  these  are  ex- 
alted into  permanent  sacramental  elements,  as  they  are 
in  sacerdotalist  thought,  they  will  have  to  stand  the 
ordinary  racket  of  natural  selection,  which  is  for  ever 


224        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

discarding  old  and  creating  new  forms;  and  so  far  as 
there  has  been  operation  of  natural  selection  in  Church 
history  it  has  on  the  whole  been  away  from  monarch- 
ical theories  of  Church  government,  deeply  entrenched 
though  these  may  be  behind  subtle  doctrines  of 
historic  continuity  and  apostolic  succession.  No  form 
of  Church  government  has  finality.  The  living  sub- 
stance does  not  tie  itself  down  for  ever  to  a  single 
form;  and  it  may  be  that  the  next  phase  of  the  form 
may  be  one  determined  by  the  seeming  tendency  of  the 
substance  in  our  time  towards  unity.  In  any  case,  there 
can  never  be  unity  on  the  basis  of  an  existing  polity. 
But  the  living  Spirit  will  in  due  time  evolve  its  own 
form  for  the  Catholic  Church  that  is  to  be. 

Meantime  the  one  essential  fact  in  the  organization 
of  the  Church  is  that  it  is  the  communion  of  the  saints. 
This  is  the  corollary  of  the  fact  that  all  human  develop- 
ment demands  a  social  environment,  and  it  is  therefore 
supremely  necessary  on  the  highest  plane  of  all.  It  is 
not  usually  recognized  how  essential  an  element  in  the 
New  Testament  conception  of  the  Church  is  the  idea 
of  fellowship.  When  Paul  prays  that  "  we  may  be 
strong  to  apprehend  with  all  the  saints  the  love  of 
Christ,"  he  is  indicating  the  fact  that  it  is  only  possible 
to  grasp  the  dimensions  of  the  love  of  Christ  on  a  basis 
of  fellowship.  It  takes  all  of  us,  and  all  of  us  together, 
to  compass  the  vastness  of  the  love  of  Christ.  It  is 
only  in  fellowship,  by  making  common  stock  of  our 
Christian  experience,  that  we  can  gain  a  real  appre- 
hension of  its  entire  content;  and  it  is  therefore  only 
in  fellowship  that  we  can  realize  a  balanced  wholesome 
individual  Christian  experience.  It  is  one  of  the  com- 
monplaces of  our  observation  that  the  solitary  unat- 


THE  FELLOWSHIP  OF  THE  CROSS    225 

tached  Christian  invariably  becomes  a  religious  crank. 
Idiosyncrasies  of  doctrine  are  usually  the  products  of 
-isolation — for  soundness  of  doctrine  rests  in  the  last 
resort  upon  soundness  of  experience.  Sound  doctrine 
is  the  child  of  a  normal,  balanced,  all-round  Christian 
experience. 

8.  For  it  must  be  remembered  that  we  do  not  think 
out  the  truth  so  much  as  in  the  first  instance  we  work 
it  out.  Our  knowledge  of  the  truth  is  the  deposit 
which  our  experience  and  active  contact  with  the  real 
world  leaves  in  our  minds.  We  gain  it  not  in  the 
study  armchair  by  processes  of  ratiocination.  That 
has  usually  a  critical  and  not  a  constructive  tendency. 
Our  knowledge  of  the  truth  is  gained  by  work  upon 
the  broad  spaces  of  the  world.  It  is  well  that  we 
should  retire  to  the  study  and  the  council-chamber  to 
beat  the  deposit  of  truth  into  manageable  and  com- 
municable shape;  but  it  comes  to  us  first  of  all  through 
our  interaction  with  the  world.  When  one  subscribes 
to  a  creed  one  accepts  a  set  of  working  postulates;  and 
it  usually  happens  that,  when  one  begins  to  live  by 
them,  most  of  them  are  practically  if  not  explicitly  dis- 
carded. The  burning  spot  of  real  belief  by  which  a 
man  lives  is  a  comparatively  small  area  in  the  con- 
tinent of  pious  opinions  to  which  he  assents;  and  that 
burning  spot  of  real  belief  is  just  the  residue  which 
one's  experience  has  returned  with,  out  of  the  stock  of 
postulates  with  which  it  set  out,  having  found  the  rest 
partly  wrong,  but  for  the  most  part  irrelevant. 

The  faith  of  the  Church  is  similarly  that  deposit  of 
truth  which  its  redemptive  contact  with  the  world  has 
precipitated  into  its  consciousness.     It  starts  out  not 


226         THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

with  a  creed,  but  with  an  impulse  and  a  purpose,  and 
it  gains  the  materials  of  its  creed  as  the  by-products  of 
the  working  out  of  its  life.  Its  creed  is  being  worked 
out  on  the  line  of  battle;  but  it  is  not  the  primary  aim 
of  the  battle.  The  history  of  the  creeds  constitutes 
a  considerable  portion  of  the  history  of  the  Church; 
and  not  yet  has  experience  brought  us  a  thoroughgoing 
sense  of  the  strictly  subordinate  place  of  the  creed  in 
the  economy  of  the  Church.  The  substance  of  the  truth 
is  one  thing,  and  we  have  it  first  of  all  as  experience; 
the  form  of  the  truth,  the  creed,  the  formula  is  a  local 
contingent  affair.  It  is  significant  that  the  great  creeds 
were  forged  out  in  the  fires  of  controversy;  they  are 
polemic  and  therefore  one-sided  documents.  They 
correspond  to  the  necessity  which  evoked  them.  The 
Nicene  Creed  was  the  reply  of  the  Church  to  the  Arian 
heresy,  and  it  did  less  than  justice  to  the  Arian  posi- 
tion. The  formula  of  Chalcedon  was  the  Church's 
antidote  to  Eutychianism,  and  it  did  not  make  full 
allowance  for  the  underlying  truth  of  the  Eutychian 
teaching.  These  great  credal  documents  were  tem- 
porary provisional  adjustments  of  current  thought  in 
the  exercise  of  a  wisdom  which,  as  Dr.  Rainy  once 
said,  was  always  sincere  but  never  perfect.  One  thing, 
however,  is  plain — that  with  all  its  creed-making,  the 
Church  has  not  yet  defined  the  whole  of  its  experience. 
Not  that  the  truth  which  is  latent  in  its  experience  is 
in  any  way  vague  or  indefinite.  It  is  the  most  definite 
thing  possible.  It  breaks  through  language  and  es- 
capes, but  it  is  the  central  reality.  The  total  impres- 
sion of  Christ  upon  the  human  spirit,  the  whole  human 
sense  of  Jesus,  is  too  big  a  thing  to  be  formulated  in 
a  set  of  propositions.     A  creed  just  tells  as  much  of 


THE  FELLOWSHIP  OF  THE  CROSS    2,2^ 

Christ  as  a  chart  of  the  solar  system  tells  of  the  solar 
system  itself;  and  just  as  the  Copernican  chart  has 
superseded  the  Ptolemaic,  so  the  creeds  of  the  Church 
supersede  one  another  as  time  goes  on.  For  since  the 
Church  is  a  living  thing,  its  experience  is  not  a  static 
but  a  progressive  thing;  and  its  creeds  must  broaden 
out  with  its  experience,  though  they  can  never  broaden 
out  sufficiently  to  cover  it  all  or  dig  deep  enough  to 
capture  the  whole  of  its  vital  core. 

The  truth  is  maintained  and  gained  when  the  whole 
life  of  the  Church  throughout  its  diverse  offices  is  gath- 
ered up  into  the  one  ministry.  The  true  Christian 
apologetic  is  the  redemptive  work  of  the  Church,  and 
it  is  never  the  argument  of  the  doctor  or  the  dialectic 
of  the  casuist  that  wins  the  battles  of  the  Christian 
faith,  but  the  work  in  which  the  life  of  the  Church 
expresses  itself  and  makes  itself  articulate  in  the  world. 
And  the  whole  life  of  the  Church  culminates  in  the 
utterance  of  a  Word.  It  is  not  easy  to  fix  the  precise 
significance  of  this  term.  It  is  that  which,  according 
to  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  "  pierces  to  the  dividing 
asunder  of  the  soul  and  spirit,"  liberates,  that  is,  the 
spiritual  life  from  the  psychical  and  natural.  It  is  a 
power,  an  energy;  and  it  may  be  mediated  in  many 
ways.  That  it  is  called  a  Word  implies  that  it  has 
a  reasoned  and  expressible  content,  and  that  is  why 
the  chief  vehicle  by  which  it  is  mediated  is  the  preach- 
ing of  the  Gospel.  But  the  Word  may  be  made  articu- 
late in  other  ways — through  music  and  painting, 
through  the  conduct  and  the  charity  of  Christian  souls. 

But  the  supreme  quality  of  the  Word  is  that  it  is 
a  Word  of  Reconciliation,  a  Word  of  Atonement,  a 
Word  which  bids  men  return  to  God  in  the  harmony 


228        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

of  an  obedient  will.  God  was  in  Christ  reconciling  the 
worid  unto  Himself;  and  He  is  in  the  Church  for  the 
same  purpose.  And  so  it  is  that  the  whole  life  of  the 
Church  becomes  vocal  in  the  Word,  "  Be  ye  reconciled 
to  God." 

We  shall  consider  presently  what  this  Word  implies 
and  how  it  is  to  be  interpreted  to  our  own  time. 
Meantime  let  it  be  pointed  out  that  in  the  utterance  of 
this  quickening  Word  the  Church  has  the  instrument 
for  the  liberation  of  the  spiritual  life  in  man;  and  in 
the  co-operative  fellowship  which  it  is  it  provides  the 
appropriate  social  environment  for  the  development  of 
the  spiritual  life.  The  life  of  the  Church  is  directed 
to  the  production  of  the  superman.  The  ordinary 
physical  processes  of  the  universe  have  produced  the 
natural  man;  the  Church  is  that  super-physical  uni- 
verse the  life  of  which  is  to  culminate  in  the  superman, 
the  full-grown  man  of  the  measure  of  the  stature  of 
the  fulness  of  Christ. 

9.  It  is  not  easy  for  the  Church  always  to  steer  its 
course  rightly  in  the  world  of  men.  With  the  growing 
complexity  of  civilization,  its  problems  multiply  indefi- 
nitely; and  its  divisions  are  born  of  a  diversity  of 
opinion  as  to  the  way  it  should  go  through  the  labyrinth 
of  the  world.  Here,  the  Church  has  allied  itself  with 
the  State,  only  later  on  to  have  to  fight  for  its  very 
life  by  detaching  itself  from  an  association  which 
fettered  it.  There,  the  Church  has  under  pressure  of 
sudden  contingencies  or  immediate  problems  deviated 
from  its  main  track  into  by-paths  of  seemingly  neces- 
sary service  which  have  in  changed  circumstances  been 
a  hindrance  to  it.     On  the  whole,  the  tendency  of  the 


THE  FELLOWSHIP  OF  THE  CROSS    229 

Church  has  been  to  step  down  from  its  own  plane  and 
to  take  too  low  a  view  of  itself  and  too  restricted  a  view 
of  its  place  in  the  world.  When  Paul  says  that  God 
gave  Christ  to  be  head  over  all  things  to  the  Church, 
he  meant  more  than  that  Christ  was  to  be  head  of  the 
Church.  He  meant  that  the  Church  was  to  exercise 
the  moral  sovereignty  of  Jesus  upon  the  earth;  and 
there  is  a  great  deal  of  truth  in  the  criticism  that  it 
has  abdicated  this  function  and  has  become  a  kind  of 
buttress  to  the  existing  order.  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  in 
his  preface  to  "  Major  Barbara  "  says  truly  that  there 
are  times  when  "  It  becomes  the  duty  of  the  churches  to 
evoke  all  the  powers  of  destruction  against  the  existing 
order.  But  if  they  do  this,"  he  continues,  "  the  exist- 
ing order  must  suppress  them.  Churches  are  suffered 
to  exist  only  on  condition  that  they  preach  submission 
to  the  State  as  at  present  capltalistlcally  organized." 
Some  allowance  must  be  made  for  Mr.  Shaw's  highly 
private  point  of  view,  but  his  charge  is,  in  the  main, 
true;  and  he  is  also  right  when  he  says  that  the  false 
position  in  which  the  churches  find  themselves  can  only 
be  escaped  by  a  reconstitutlon  of  society.  So  long  as 
Christian  enterprise  and  philanthropy  depend  so  largely 
upon  the  largess  of  the  rich,  the  Church  must  stand  for 
the  social  organization  which  creates  the  rich  at  the 
expense  of  leaving  in  its  train  a  large  by-product  of 
poverty.  But  it  is  not  the  function  of  the  Church  nor 
its  place  to  go  cap  in  hand  to  the  opulent  for  the  where- 
withal of  its  enterprises;  it  has  a  higher  office  which 
it  can  and  may  discharge.  It  may  be,  if  and  when  it 
chooses,  the  most  powerful  creator  of  public  opinion, 
and  It  may  assume  a  sovereignty  over  the  State  and 
every  other  institution  which  shall  compel  them  to  con- 


230         THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

form  themselves  to  its  purpose,  to  become  subordinate 
and  tributary  to  its  supreme  ministry  of  making  man- 
hood. I  do  not  mean  that  the  Church  should  become 
a  formal  dictator  to  the  rulers  of  men,  nor  that  it 
should  have  a  political  status  as  a  temporal  power  or 
as  a  State  Church,  but  that  it  should  hold  such  a  place 
in  the  regard  of  men  that,  when  it  speaks,  it  shall 
speak  with  a  power  which  compels  a  hearing,  so  that 
no  man,  be  he  monarch  or  peasant,  and  no  community, 
shall  do  or  permit  unrighteousness,  for  fear  of  its 
censure.  The  Church  must  not  be  content  to  be  a  mere 
element  in  the  life  of  the  world,  one  among  the  multi- 
tude of  the  world's  interests  and  concerns.  There  is 
no  ideal  for  us  of  the  Church  which  is  true  or  valid 
save  that  implicit  in  the  New  Testament :  that  it  is  to 
become  a  world-power,  not,  indeed,  by  the  formal  de- 
cree of  the  kings  of  the  earth,  but  by  reason  of  its  own 
overwhelming  inner  mightiness. 

It  was  a  bad  day  for  the  Church  when  it  made  terms 
with  the  State.  It  was  the  mating  of  incongruities; 
and  the  Church  has  involved  itself  thereby  in  endless 
trouble.  There  is  a  certain  plausibility  in  the  claim 
that  the  religious  life  of  a  nation  should  become  vocal 
in  the  Church;  and  it  is  no  doubt  desirable  that  there 
should  be  means  whereby  the  conscience  of  a  nation 
may  discharge  itself.  But  a  State  connection  entails 
the  danger  that  that  conscience  may  be  for  ever  silenced 
along  one  definite  line — namely,  the  doings  of  the  State 
itself.  For  the  State  is  not  the  nation — it  is  simply 
the  police  organization  which  the  nation  has  set  up 
for  its  own  defence  and  preservation.  It  is  the  ma- 
chinery of  national  life  and  not  the  life  itself;  and  it 
reflects,  not  an  ideal,  but  the  average  ethical  level  of 


THE  FELLOWSHIP  OF  THE  CROSS    231 

the  nation  at  the  time.  A  nation's  religious  life  may 
rise,  has  often  risen,  above  the  average  ethical  level 
which  the  State  embodies;  but  if  its  religious  organiza- 
tion is  in  treaty  with  the  State,  it  can  never  effectually 
make  articulate  the  uprisings  of  its  religious  life.  An 
Established  Church  inevitably  becomes  the  bulwark  of 
the  status  quo,  with  the  result  that  it  absorbs  almost 
always  a  particular  political  color,  and  at  the  same  time 
cramps  the  development  of  religious  life  within  itself. 
Moreover,  where  an  Established  Church  exists  side 
by  side  with  other  religious  organizations,  the  general 
tendency  is  towards  intolerance  and  persecution.  It  is 
tempted  (and  sometimes  falls  into  the  temptation)  to 
use  its  political  connections  to  confirm  and  increase  its 
own  privileges,  with  the  result  that  other  religious 
organizations  become  in  self-defence  involved  in  a  po- 
litical melee  which  is  altogether  detrimental  to  their 
spirituality.  We  have  heard  a  great  deal  latterly  of 
the  relation  of  the  Church  to  politics.  It  is  only  on 
the  basis  of  separation  and  absolute  toleration  that 
Church  and  State  can  exist  side  by  side  and  thrive. 
Rome,  says  Dante : — 

Was  wont  to  boast  two  suns,  whose  several  beams 
Cast  light  on  either  way,  the  world's  and  God's. 
One  since  hath  quenched  the  other:  and  the  sword 
Is  grafted  on  the  crook:  and  so  conjoin'd 
Each  must  perforce  decline  to  worse.* 

Where  the  Church  and  the  State  are  linked  together 
the  spiritual  development  of  the  one  and  the  moral 
elevation  of  the  other  are  arrested.  It  becomes  an 
unholy  alliance  in  defence  of  the  status  quo,  and  in  the 

*Purg.,xvi.,  109-15. 


212        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

end  it  is  the  Church  that  suffers  most.  For  it  can  only 
remain  loyal  to  the  State  by  compromising  on  its  own 
principles.  The  modern  State  rests  upon  force, 
whereas  if  the  Church  has  any  political  mission  in  the 
world  it  is  the  development  of  a  State  which  needs  no 
physical  force  to  hold  it  together.  It  is  a  far  cry  to 
such  a  State,  but  its  day  is  not  hastened  by  the  alliance 
of  the  Church  with,  and  its  endorsement  of,  a  State 
which  depends  upon  the  very  thing  that  it  is  the  busi- 
ness of  the  Church  to  make  superfluous. 

To  restore  the  Church  its  liberty  is  a  very  much 
more  difficult  matter  than  one  may  suppose.  The  pres- 
ent situation  has  its  roots  away  in  the  past,  and  a  mere 
summary  severance  of  Church  and  State  is  not  the 
remedy.  Lord  Acton  speaks  of  "  the  undiscovered 
country  where  Church  and  State  are  parted,"  and  it 
will  need  much  patience  to  explore  it.  Disestablishment 
is  easy  to  speak  of,  but  at  best  it  is  a  purely  negative 
thing.  It  is  a  process  of  equalization  among  religious 
organizations.  But  more  than  disestablishment  is 
necessary.  What  is  really  needed  is  a  resurgence  in  all 
the  churches  of  a  larger,  more  radical  spirituality, 
which  will  lift  the  whole  Church  to  a  plane  of  life  in 
which  a  State  connection  would  be  a  pure  irrelevancy, 
and  from  which  the  Church  would  be  able  to  work 
upon  the  State  and  increasingly  raise  its  ethical  level. 
But  before  the  Church  can  do  that,  it  must  be  free  from 
the  control  of  and  from  obligation  to  the  State. 


XIX 
THE  NEW  EVANGELISM 

THE  fact  that  the  whole  life  of  the  Church  makes 
itself  vocal  in  a  "  Word  "  suggests  that  its 
genius  is  essentially  propagandist.  It  is  a  her- 
ald, a  witness;  and  it  mediates  its  message  to  the  world 
through  "  the  foolishness  of  preaching."  But  what  it 
does  not  always  see  clearly  is  that  its  preaching  is  to 
have  a  sharp  propagandist  edge;  that  its  intention  pri- 
marily is  to  win  partisans  for  Christ.  The  Church  does 
its  work  by  the  preaching  of  the  Gospel;  it  misses  the 
point  when  it  preaches  about  the  Gospel.  It  is  to  face 
the  world  with  a  challenge  and  an  invitation,  not  to 
propound  a  thesis  and  to  elaborate  it  in  a  dissertation. 

Let  it  be  said,  however,  that  in  practice  preaching 
has  a  twofold  purpose — the  one  educational,  the  other 
evangelistic.  The  one  refers  to  those  already  in  the 
Church,  and  aims  at  the  enlargement  and  deepening  of 
their  experience  and  the  quickening  of  their  conscience; 
the  other  refers  to  those  who  are  outside  the  Church, 
and  aims  at  bringing  them  into  a  definite  personal  con- 
nection with  Christ. 

It  is  part  of  the  disorder  that  has  befallen  the  Church 
that  the  latter  office  is  usually  regarded  as  the  peculiar 
prerogative  of  specially  endowed  men,  who  therefore 
are  supposed  to  circulate  around  the  churches  to  com- 
plete the  preaching  function  of  the  Church.    The  ordi- 

233 


234         THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

nary  minister  is  regarded  as,  on  the  whole,  incapable 
of  doing  this  work,  and  has  by  now  accepted  the  theory 
of  his  incapacity  for  it,  at  the  same  time  regarding 
the  brother  specially  fitted  for  it  as  belonging  to  an 
order  somewhat  inferior  to  his  own.  But  it  is,  per- 
haps, the  most  perplexing  element  in  the  whole  situa- 
tion, that  while  the  ordinary  minister  is  required  to 
satisfy  certain  educational  requirements,  the  circulating 
evangelist  is,  on  the  whole,  regarded  as  being  better 
without  a  special  education.  He  is  not  unoften  con- 
temptuous of  ministerial  education.  There  are  some 
outstanding  exceptions,  it  is  true;  but,  speaking 
generally,  this  is  how  matters  stand. 

In  addition  to  this,  there  has  appeared  a  tendency 
to  think  that  evangelistic  work  is  most  successfully 
conducted  away  from  the  ordinary  church  buildings, 
and  that  in  particular  it  is  necessary  to  success  that 
evangelistic  campaigns  should  be  organized  on  a  large 
scale,  without  any  special  denominational  affiliation. 
Now,  I  should  hardly  venture  to  deny  that  evangelism 
carried  on  in  this  way  does  a  certain  amount  of  good ; 
but  I  do  venture  to  say  that  this  whole  conception  of 
it  is  from  top  to  bottom  fallacious. 

I  know  that  it  may  be  argued  that  in  the  early 
Christian  organization  there  were  "  evangelists,  pas- 
tors, and  teachers,"  and  that  it  is  a  sign  of  retrogression 
that  to-day  one  person  is  expected  to  discharge  the 
three  offices,  and  that,  therefore,  the  special  evangelist 
is  justified.  But  the  truth  surely  is  that  the  minister  is 
the  modern  representative  of  the  evangelist  in  the  first 
instance;  and  that  his  discharge  of  the  teaching  and 
pastoral  offices  should  be  secondary  to  his  evangelistic 
function.     The  minister  should  be  first  and  most  of 


THE  NEW  EVANGELISM  235 

all  an  evangelist.  It  is  certainly  sometimes  useful  that 
the  preacher's  evangelistic  ministry  should  be  brought 
to  a  head  and  its  harvest  reaped  by  the  introduction  of 
a  fresh  accent  and  a  fresh  point  of  view  through  the 
aid  of  some  other  minister;  but  that  minister  who  is 
not  looking  for  conversions  all  the  way  through  is 
missing  the  most  vital  point  of  his  whole  ministry. 
There  will  be  some  who  are  more  gifted  than  others 
in  achieving  such  results ;  but  no  man  who  assumes  the 
preaching  office  is  exempt  from  the  endeavor,  in  his 
own  measure,  to  achieve  them. 

What  is,  however,  of  more  consequence  than  the 
method  used  or  the  functionary  concerned  in  proclaim- 
ing the  Christian  message  is  the  content  of  the  message 
itself.  Even  this  is,  indeed,  not  the  ultimate  thing,  for 
the  power  of  the  Christian  message  lies  in  the  combina- 
tion of  its  content  with  the  personality  of  the  individ- 
ual who  declares  it.  The  Word,  the  living  thing  which 
awakens  the  spiritual  life  in  men,  is  a  distinctly  per- 
sonal thing,  and  no  proclamation  of  a  message  avails 
anything  except  it  have  passed  through  the  crucible  of 
a  personal  experience.  The  true  preacher  communi- 
cates something  of  himself;  and  it  is  his  own  living  self 
that  vitalizes  the  message.  How  it  comes  to  pass  that 
the  impact  of  a  message  thus  delivered  does  quicken 
the  spiritual  life  is  a  psychological  problem  which,  in 
the  present  stage  of  our  knowledge,  is  not  amenable  to 
analysis.  But  that  it  does  so  is  beyond  question;  and 
that  the  personal  factor  is  essential  is  demonstrated  by 
the  fact  that  two  men  may  deliver  the  same  message 
with  the  most  complete  difference  of  results.  The  one 
may  achieve  conversions  and  the  other  may  not. 

True  preaching  is  surely  itself  a  communication  qi 


236        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

the  spiritual  life,  and  its  momentum  is  the  entire  push 
of  the  Universal  Spirit  which  is  for  ever  seeking  to 
express  itself  in  a  quickening  Word.  But  this  does  not 
imply  that  the  content  of  the  message  is  immaterial. 
On  the  contrary,  a  "  form  of  sound  words  "  must  be 
found  as  a  vehicle  for  the  Word.  The  Word  reinforces 
and  is  reinforced  by  a  faithful,  sincere  statement  of  the 
Christian  message  in  a  way  which  commends  itself  to 
the  mind,  and  which  finds  an  echo  in  the  conscience  of 
the  hearer.  The  Word  must  have  its  own  appropriate 
idiom  of  thought  and  speech  in  order  to  make  itself 
articulate  in  the  world. 

That  is  to  say,  there  can  be  no  real  preaching  of  the 
Gospel  without  a  theology.  It  may  not  be  a  complete 
theology;  it  may  not  be  even  a  conscious  theology — 
that  is,  the  preacher  may  not  be  conscious  of  it  as  a 
theology.  But  any  kind  of  formal  statement  of  a 
spiritual  experience  not  merely  involves  but  inevitably 
is  a  theology.  It  may  be  crude,  and  it  may  be  innocent 
of  the  stock  phrases  of  theology  (and  be  none  the 
worse  for  that),  but  it  is  a  real  theology  nevertheless. 
No  man  will  go  very  far  except  he  have  a  more  or 
less  systematic  account  in  his  mind  of  the  experience 
which  he  is  seeking  to  awaken  in  those  who  hear  him. 

Indeed,  in  modern  evangelism  there  is  no  great  room 
for  a  complaint  of  lack  of  theology.  The  doctrine  of 
the  circulating  evangelist  is  always  most  dogmatically 
definite;  and  this  affords  him  the  additional  advantage 
of  being  able  to  give  what  in  certain  circles  is  called 
"definite  teaching."  There  can  be  no  doubt  at  all 
that  with  the  average  man  definiteness  of  teaching  is 
a  strong  recommendation.  He  is  only  irritated  by 
vague,  nebulous,  and  highly  qualified  statements  of 


THE  NEW  EVANGELISM  237 

Christian  truth.  This  is  certainly  one  element  in  the 
strength  of  the  evangelist;  but  it  is  in  some  respects 
the  cause  of  his  greatest  weakness.  For  with  his  as- 
sured definiteness  of  doctrine  he  feels  no  need  to  co- 
ordinate his  message  to  the  increasing  knowledge  of 
the  time,  and  consequently,  when  a  young  convert  puts 
the  system  to  the  proof,  it  breaks  down  in  the  face 
of  the  realities  which  he  must,  soon  or  late,  encounter. 
Current  evangelism  is  conservative  in  its  theology; 
and  while  this  circumstance  gives  it  certain  elements  of 
strength  it  nevertheless  stands  in  jeopardy  every  hour 
in  a  world  which  is  not  conservative,  but  is  for  ever 
changing. 

Let  it  be  said,  however,  that  the  preservation  of 
the  evangelistic  note  in  modern  Christianity  is  mostly 
due  to  the  conservative  evangelist.  Liberal  theo-  7r  t*  e. 
logians  have  generally  shown  little  disposition  towards 
aggressive  evangelism;  and  this,  more  than  any  other 
factor,  explains  the  dubiety  of  ordinary  Christian  folk 
concerning  new  movements  in  theology.  After  all,  the 
test  of  a  theology  is  whether  it  represents  a  religious 
consciousness  which  is  essentially  aggressive,  and  can 
make  itself  vocal  in  terms  that  are  intelligible  to  the 
average  person.  Fashions  in  theology  which  carry 
with  them  no  compulsion  to  witness  are  condemned 
already,  for  they  have  departed  from  Christianity.  It 
has  been  said  that  a  church  which  ceases  to  be  evan- 
gelistic soon  ceases  to  be  evangelical.  More  than  this 
may  be  said.  Such  a  church  ceases  also  to  be  Chris- 
tian. Unless  the  church  feels  the  necessity  of  evan- 
gelism laid  upon  it  as  an  irresistible  constraint,  it 
should  at  once  proceed  to  examine  itself. 

It  may  seem  ungracious,  seeing  that  this  essential 


238        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

element   of   Christianity   has   been  preserved   by  the 
loyalty  of  the  traditional  evangelistic  school,  to  embark 
upon  a  criticism  of  it;  but  if  Christianity  is  not  to  fail 
to  commend  and  justify  itself  to  the  world  to-day, 
such  criticism  is  inevitable.    For  instance,  much  of  the 
force  of  this  type  of  evangelism  rests  in  the  confidence 
'        with  which  it  appeals  to  the  letter  of  Scripture.     But 
"*         we  are  passing  away  rapidly  from  the  doctrine  of  In- 
spiration which  makes  such  an  appeal  possible,  and  we 
are  involved  in  a  process  of  public  education  which 
7         will  inevitably  breed  a  more  critical  and  exacting  intel- 
,  lectual  temper  than  that  which  has  in  the  past  accepted 

the  validity  of  such  an  appeal.  The  evangelism  of  the 
2  future  must  find  a  new  authority  if  it  wishes  to  retain 
"*       its  power  undiminished. 

The  evangelism  which  we  are  now  passing  in  review 
comes  to  a  point  in  the  idea  of  salvation  or  conversion. 
These  two  are  regarded  rightly  as  two  aspects  of  the 
same  personal  experience;  and  the  evangelist  properly 
conceives  the  achievement  of  this  personal  experience 
in  others  as  the  point  which  he  is  particularly  to  aim  at. 
But  he  has  not  usually  given  these  two  terms  their  full 
value.  In  his  hands  they  are  almost  altogether  of  a 
negative  connotation,  and  have  reference  to  a  deliver- 
ance from  sin;  and  sin  is  interpreted  exclusively  in 
Jewish  fashion. 

Now  the  word  "  salvation  "  and  its  relatives  in  the 
New  Testament  have  a  very  elastic  meaning.  It  is 
only  necessary  to  point  to  the  uses  of  the  word  in 
Phil.  i.  19  and  28,  and  ii.  12,  to  show  how  its  connota- 
tion varies.  The  root  idea  seems  to  be  that  of  welfare, 
as  it  is  in  such  expressions  as  "  God  save  the  King,"  in 
which  there  is  almost  a  complete  absence  of  negative 


THE  NEW  EVANGELISM  239 

elements.  When  the  Philippian  jailer  asked,  "  What 
must  I  do  to  be  saved?"  it  is  impossible  to  believe 
that  he  had  been  shocked  into  a  particular  concern  for 
the  salvation  of  his  soul  in  the  evangelistic  sense.  It 
was  the  question  of  a  man  thrown  into  a  panic  by  an 
earthquake;  and  Paul's  answer,  that  he  should  believe 
on  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  and  be  saved,  presented  to 
him  a  way  whereby  under  all  circumstances  it  would 
be  well  with  him.  So  far  as  the  notion  of  saving  from 
sin  was  present,  it  was  only  as  a  part  of  the  larger 
process  of  establishing  the  welfare  of  the  whole  man. 
But  in  a  current  evangelistic  usage  the  word  is  defi- 
nitely polarized,  and  has  the  unvarying  reference  to 
a  deliverance  from  sin. 

But  its  conception  of  sin  is  Jewish — that  is  to  say, 
it  is  legal;  and  consequently  its  conception  of  the 
Atonement  is  charged  with  penal  ideas.  It  pins  its 
faith  wholly  to  a  single  theory  of  substitution;  and 
salvation  becomes  very  largely  a  deliverance  from  the 
retribution  which  sin  brings  in  its  train.  It  is  salvation 
supremely  from  hell.  Now,  it  would  be  gratuitous 
folly  to  deny  that  there  is  truth  in  all  this;  but  it  would 
be  sheer  blindness  to  imagine  that  this  is  the  whole 
Gospel.  All  this,  at  the  best,  is  purely  preliminary — a 
clearing  of  the  decks  for  action — and  it  is  not  even 
complete  at  that.  A  true  evangelism  must  insist  upon 
giving  their  full  value  to  the  great  evangelical  terms, 
Repentance,  Salvation,  Conversion.  They  do  not  refer 
exclusively  to  ethical  changes.  The  change  they  imply 
has  definite  ethical  consequences;  and  the  consistent 
linking  of  the  idea  of  salvation  to  sin  has  tended  to 
obscure  what  this  crisis  in  life  stands  for  as  a  whole. 
It  is  not  merely  a  reversal  of  moral  tendency.    That  is 


240        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

one  and  the  chief  of  its  consequences.  It  is  primarily 
the  change  from  the  natural  to  the  spiritual  life;  and  it 
is  no  less  a  revolution,  whether  the  natural  life  has  been 
spent  in  the  pursuit  of  vicious  satisfactions  or  in  an  en- 
deavor after  a  certain  standard  of  moral  attainment. 
The  prominence  of  the  negative  elements  of  the  Gos- 
pel message  is  mostly  derived  from  our  peculiar  theo- 
logical inheritance  from  the  Reformation.  Justification 
by  Faith  belongs  to  the  negative  side  of  the  Gospel;  it 
conveys  the  fact  that  a  man  is  declared  by  God  to  be 
and  treated  as  righteous,  that  his  guilt  is  written  off, 
and  that  he  has  attained  this  condition  by  exercising 
faith.  The  positive  elements  of  the  Christian  message 
are  implied  in  the  idea  of  Justification  by  Faith  rightly 
understood;  for  no  definition  of  faith  covers  the 
ground  save  that  which  regards  it  as  a  definite,  perma- 
nent God-ward  posture  of  the  soul.  This,  however,  is 
not  its  connotation  in  the  current  speech  of  the  prevail- 
ing evangelism.  One  act  of  faith  evokes  God's  declara- 
tion of  justification,  and  that  secures  the  believer  for 
good  and  all  from  condemnation.  He  is  saved.  So 
far,  good;  but  it  does  not  carry  us  sufficiently  far.  For 
in  the  Book  of  Acts  on  one  occasion  it  is  declared  that 
there  were  added  daily  to  the  Church  such  as  were 
being  saved — wherein  salvation  is  regarded  not  as  a 
single  act  but  as  a  process.  Paul  bids  his  Philippian 
correspondents  work  out  their  own  salvation  with  fear 
and  trembling;  and  here  salvation  is  regarded  as  a 
process  which  the  believer  himself  has  to  work  out. 
But  he  immediately  adds,  "  It  is  God  that  worketh  in 
you  both  to  will  and  to  work."  This  statement  indi- 
cates to  us  what  the  positive  impulse  of  salvation  is. 
It  is  the  divine  life,  the  life  of  the  Spirit  in  us. 


THE  NEW  EVANGELISM  241 

We  have,  therefore,  to  push  on  from  the  principle 
of  Justification  by  Faith  to  the  positive  principle  of 
which  it  is  the  initial  negative  movement.  We  have  to 
do  more.  The  principle  of  Justification  by  Faith  re- 
gards the  ethical  implicates  of  salvation  as  the  ultimate 
ones,  whereas  they  are  derivative  and  secondary.  We 
have  to  move  on  from  Justification,  therefore,  to  some- 
thing super-ethical  from  which  the  ethical  derives. 
And  as  we  have  seen  that  the  characteristic  Christian 
ethic  is  a  derivative  from  the  Christian  metaphysic, 
from  its  peculiar  emphasis  upon  the  supremacy  and 
primacy  of  the  spiritual  life,  we  must  find  an  expres- 
sion of  a  formula  for  the  embodiment  of  this  ultimate 
principle  of  spirituality  if  we  are  to  convert  it  into  an 
intelligible  message  to  our  time. 

Now,  it  may  be  plausibly  argued  that  Christianity 
was  brought  into  the  world  in  order  to  enable  the 
average  man  to  lay  hold  of  God.  It  reduced  God,  as 
it  were,  into  terms  of  flesh  and  blood,  into  a  concrete, 
intelligible  form;  and  it  has  endeavored  to  translate 
this  accessibility  into  its  characteristic  speech.  It 
makes  the  thought  of  God  accessible  to  the  average 
intelligence  by  presenting  the  person  of  Jesus;  and 
while  the  average  man  would  only  be  irritated  by  vague 
invitations  to  appropriate  the  divine  life,  the  New 
Testament  comes  to  the  same  point  and  achieves  the 
same  result  by  speaking  of  the  Indwelling  Christ.  The 
doctrine  of  the  Indwelling  Christ  is  the  crown  and 
climax  of  the  Christian  teaching;  it  is  the  supreme 
positive  element  from  which  everything  else  in  Chris- 
tian experience  derives,  and  to  which  everything  else 
leads  up.  In  Paul's  mind,  when  he  is  liberated  from 
Jewish  preconceptions   (as  seemingly  he  is  in  an  in- 


— |A/\/j 


242         THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

creasing  degree  with  the  passing  of  time),  this  particu- 
lar doctrine  becomes  the  natural  expression  of  his 
spiritual  experience,  and  it  becomes  also  more  and 
more  the  determining  factor  of  the  form  of  his  later 
theological  constructions.  The  Christ  in  Whom  the 
whole  heart  and  mind  of  God  is  gathered  up  in  one 
outgoing  towards  man  becomes  the  life  principle  of  the 
man  who  permits  Him  to  inhabit  his  soul.  His  life  is 
fused  into  the  life  of  God,  and  henceforth  it  is  God 
Who  worketh  in  him. 

This,  then,  we  beheve,  must  be  the  burden  of  the 
evangelism  of  the  future.  Its  whole  theology  and 
the  form  of  its  message  must  be  determined  by  the 
necessity  of  presenting  the  Indwelling  Christ  as  the 
one  thing  needful.  It  will  probably  have  to  cast  off 
some  elements  of  its  present  theological  background, 
and  in  any  case  will  have  to  revise  the  relative  em- 
phasis upon  its  several  parts.  But,  whatever  happens, 
its  aim  must  be  to  enable  men  to  gain  the  supreme 
Pauline  experience,  and  to  say,  "  To  me  to  live  is 
Christ." 

But  it  will  be  at  once  seen  that  one  element  in  the 
equipment  of  the  current  evangelism — which  probably 
lent  more  force  to  its  message  than  any  other  element 
— must  inevitably  be  regarded  as,  if  not  irrelevant,  at 
least  strictly  subordinate — that  is,  the  appeal  to  fear. 
Whether  for  good  or  evil,  the  Jewish  conception  of 
sin  is  no  longer  tenable — at  least  in  its  crude,  unquali- 
fied form;  and,  in  any  case,  it  is  true  that  agnosticism 
has  so  far  done  its  work  as  to  extract  all  terror  from 
hell.  It  is  questionable  whether  we  shall  ever  see  again 
as  a  normal  experience  the  kind  of  conviction  of  sin 
under  which  our  fathers  labored;  and,  so  far  as  my 


THE  NEW  EVANGELISM  243 

observation  goes,  the  terror  of  the  law  is  not  to-day 
generally  an  efficient  accessory  to  the  persuading  of 
men.  The  appeal  to  fear  is  becoming  less  and  less 
forcible;  and  though  this  involves  the  loss  of  a  very 
mighty  leverage  in  the  hands  of  the  evangelist,  it  must 
be  acquiesced  in. 

This,  however,  does  not  mean  that  the  new  evangel- 
ism is  to  have  no  leverage  of  the  emotional  kind.  In- 
deed, it  must  have  a  point  of  contact  with  men  in  this 
region  If  it  is  to  touch  them  to  any  purpose.  I  believe, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  that  the  kind  of  appeal  which  is 
implicit  in  the  doctrine  of  the  Indwelling  Christ  is 
mightier  and  more  wholesome  than  the  appeal  to  fear 
could  possibly  be. 

For,  if  the  spiritual  life  be  the  true  predestined  life 
of  man,  Christianity  comes  and  says  the  plainest,  most 
obvious  thing  that  could  be  said  to  a  man — namely, 
"  Be  a  man."  And  it  points  out  the  way  to  the  achieve- 
ment of  this  manhood.  The  idea  is  implicit  in  Tenny- 
son's quatrain: — 

Though  truths  in  manhood  darkly  join 
Deep-seated  in  our  mystic  frame, 
We  yield  all  blessing  to  the  name 

Of  Him  Who  made  them  current  coin. 

What  Tennyson  means  is  that  there  are  within  us 
tendencies  and  instincts  and  intimations  of  a  larger  life 
than  that  of  nature — slumbering,  maybe,  and  sup- 
pressed, but  there,  awaiting  their  emancipation.  Chris- 
tianity offers  this  emancipation — ofifers  to  lead  these 
instinctive  tendencies  into  that  spiritual  universe  which 
is  their  proper  environment,  and  in  which  alone  they 
can  attain  their  perfect  development.     But  because  a 


244        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

man  himself  is  the  arbiter  of  his  destiny,  and  it  de- 
pends upon  himself  whether  these  spiritual  tendencies 
shall  be  liberated,  and  because,  further,  he  has  lived 
the  natural  life  which  tends  more  and  more  to  suppress 
and  obliterate  them,  the  call  of  the  Gospel  must  for 
ever  become  articulate  in  a  call  to  repentance,  in  a  de- 
mand for  a  complete  reversal  of  the  direction  of  life. 

This  call  finds  us.  When  we  hear  it  in  our  soul  we 
know  that  it  is  meant  for  us.  It  evokes  an  immediate 
response  from  those  suppressed  spiritual  possibilities  in 
our  hearts.  We  go  out  to  it  because  we  know  that  it 
is  what  we  need — and  what  we  owe.  With  greater 
truth  than  the  writer  of  Deuteronomy  could  Paul  say, 
"  The  word  is  nigh  thee,  in  thy  mouth  and  in  thy 
heart."  If  the  old  Jewish  law  found  its  justification 
in  the  conscience  of  the  Jew,  the  Christian  law  much 
more  finds  its  justification  in  the  soul  of  a  man.  For 
the  law  which  was  justified  by  the  Jew's  conscience  was 
an  external  code;  while  the  ideal  which  is  justified 
by  the  response  of  the  human  soul  is  embodied  in 
a  human  life.  It  is  not  only  a  man's  conscience  that 
attests  the  validity  of  the  Christian  appeal,  but  his 
entire  manhood.  He  sees,  in  Jesus,  himself  as  he 
ought  to  be:  the  highest,  holiest  Manhood;  and  the 
strength  of  the  Gospel  lies  in  the  irresistible  appeal 
which  it  makes  to  all  that  is  deepest  in  manhood. 

The  Gospel  does  not  leave  it  at  that.  It  not  only 
provides  an  ideal  of  manhood  and  reveals  the  chasm 
which  yawns  between  the  natural  and  the  ideal  man- 
hood, but  it  offers  the  means  whereby  the  ideal  may  be 
realized.  It  tells  the  man  that  if  he  will  break  with 
the  flesh,  Christ  will  dwell  in  his  heart — the  very  Christ 
Who  became  incarnate  in  the  perfect  manhood  of  Jesus 


THE  NEW  EVANGELISM  245 

will  re-incarnate  Himself  in  him,  and  bring  him  into 
conformity  with  the  same  image. 

It  is  an  appeal  to  the  reverence  of  manhood  which 
the  Gospel  brings — it  bids  a  man  rise  to  the  highest 
possibilities  latent  in  him,  to  unite  the  suppressed  and 
dwarfed  spiritual  inner  instincts  in  a  new  synthesis  in 
Christ,  and  thereby  to  inaugurate  a  new  development 
on  a  higher  plane.  It  appeals  to  a  better  form  of  an 
instinct  which  is  very  active  in  our  day  and  which 
embodies  itself  in  the  passion  for  physical  culture, 
mind  power,  and  so  forth.  It  comes  with  the  promise 
and  the  power  of  a  higher — which  is  the  only  true — 
manhood. 

But  that  is  not  the  only  appeal  it  makes.  The  very 
nature  of  the  Christian  life,  because  it  is  a  witness  and 
a  service,  appeals  to  one  particular  spot  in  us  where 
more  than  anywhere  else  it  is  good  for  us  and  it  is! 
pleasing  to  us  to  be  appealed  to — it  appeals  to  what  is 
chivalrous  and  heroic  in  us.  It  is  a  commonplace  how 
inviting  the  prospect  of  hardship  and  of  danger  is  to 
sound  manhood.  The  rock-climber,  the  Alpine  climber, 
invite  danger  and  hardship.  We  know  the  readiness 
with  which  men  and  women  have  volunteered  for  posts 
of  danger  in  plague-stricken  areas;  and  the  competi- 
tion between  soldiers  to  be  sent  upon  arduous  and 
perilous  missions.  The  older  evangelism  appealed  to 
our  fear;  the  evangelism  of  the  future  will  appeal,  and 
more  effectively,  to  our  courage.  William  James  once 
wrote  an  article  on  "  A  Moral  Equivalent  for  War." 
He  need  not  have  looked  far  afield.  The  enterprises 
of  Christianity  in  the  world  are  more  than  an  equiv- 
alent for  war.  It  was  said  of  Charles  Kingsley  that 
he   could   be   heroic   without   romance;    and   it   is   a 


246        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

heroism  which  derives  but  very  occasional  stimulus 
from  romance  that  the  Christian  enterprise  calls  for  in 
the  business  of  vv^orld-redemption.  It  calls  every  man 
to  a  life  of  sustained  simplicity  and  self-discipline — 
itself  no  light  undertaking;  but  it  calls  every  man  also 
to  a  life  of  sacrifice  and  self-denial  and  endurance. 
For  its  call  is  to  fellowship  in  the  greatest,  vastest  en- 
terprise in  the  world — that  of  winning  the  world  and 
its  kingdoms  to  the  obedience  of  Christ.  It  invites 
every  man  to  a  personal  share  in  that  wide  co-operation 
by  which  the  world  will  be  delivered  from  the  bondage 
of  corruption  into  the  glorious  liberty  of  the  sons  of 
God. 


XX 

THE  IMPERIALISM  OF  THE  SPIRIT 

THERE  are  no  geographical  limits  to  the  Chris- 
tian propaganda.  Because  the  aim  and  end  of 
the  Gospel  in  the  world  is  the  production  of  the 
superman  of  the  New  Testament,  the  missionary  enter- 
prise is  inherent  in  the  substance  and  marrow  of  it. 

The  time  has  passed  when  it  was  necessary  to  make 
an  apology  for  Christian  missions — that  is,  an  apology 
separate  from  and  additional  to  an  apology  for  Chris- 
tianity. To  justify  Christianity  is  to  justify  missions. 
We  cannot  to-day  conceive  of  a  Christianity  which  is 
not  missionary. 

There  has  been  a  great  deal  of  criticism  of  the 
missionary  enterprise  in  recent  years,  but  a  multitude 
of  circumstances  have  combined  to  reduce  this  criti- 
cism to  its  proper  dimensions.  Much  of  it  was  dis- 
credited from  the  start  by  its  origin.  The  ignorant 
gibes  of  superior  persons  who  have  "  travelled,"  the 
small  talk  from  the  smoke-rooms  of  East-bound 
steamers,  the  superficial  judgments  of  people  whose 
acquaintance  with  the  mission  field  penetrates  no  far- 
ther than  the  wharves  of  big  seaports — these  could  be 
written  off  as  irrelevant  and  negligible  all  along.  In 
addition  to  this,  however,  there  has  been  a  good  deal  of 
misgiving  upon  the  part  of  serious  men  who  doubted 
whether  it  was  right  to  obtrude  a  Western  religion 

247 


248        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

upon  the  Eastern  mind,  and  whether  current  mission- 
ary methods  are  adapted  to  the  needs  of  the  non-Chris- 
tian world.  But  we  have  by  now  abundant  evidence 
that  these  misgivings  are  groundless.  Doubtless  there 
have  been  mistakes  of  policy  and  practice — and  of  these 
not  a  few.  There  have  been  also  missionaries  who 
were  unworthy  of  their  calling.  Nevertheless,  when 
independent  first-hand  inquiry  into  the  work  of  foreign 
missionaries  has  been  made  in  the  light  of  full  knowl- 
edge, it  has  been  invariably  in  favor  of  the  missionary. 
It  is  hardly  necessary  now  to  cite  the  evidence.  To 
mention  the  names  of  travellers  like  Mrs.  Bishop,  of 
journalists  like  Dr.  Morrison  of  Peking,  and  Mr.  F.  A. 
McKenzie,  of  administrators  like  Sir  Andrew  Eraser, 
and  to  recall  their  testimony,  is  adequate  demonstra- 
tion that  the  missionary  enterprise  is  endorsed  by  the 
judgment  of  men  who  by  reason  of  the  extent  and  inti- 
macy of  their  knowledge  are  entitled  to  sit  in  judg- 
ment. It  may  be  confidently  asserted  that  the  per- 
sonnel and  proceedings  of  the  Edinburgh  Missionary 
Conference  in  191 1  does  establish,  for  good  and  all,  not 
only  the  validity,  but  the  urgency,  of  the  missionary 
enterprise. 

The  present  time,  moreover,  presents  missionary  op- 
portunities unparalleled  in  history.  The  opening  of 
the  world  to  missionary  enterprise,  the  unique  situation 
produced  by  the  awakening  of  China,  and  that  wonder- 
ful succession  of  national  renascences  in  the  East,  near 
and  far,  the  missionary  revival  of  Islam,  with  its  fierce 
challenge  to  Christianity  in  Africa — all  these  have  com- 
bined to  create  a  situation  which  is  altogether  unique, 
the  potentialities  of  which  are  immeasurable,  and 
which,  grasped  and  utilized  in  a  prompt  and  states- 


THE  IMPERIALISM  OF  THE  SPIRIT   249 

manlike  way,  may  bring  the  evangelization  of  the 
world  in  this  generation  within  the  scope  of  practical 
politics. 

The  case  for  Christian  missions  rests  in  the  last 
analysis  upon  the  circumstance  that  Christianity  alone 
provides  for  the  production  of  the  highest  type  of  man- 
hood. Time  was  when  the  missionary  appeal  was 
enforced  by  the  argument  that  every  day,  every  hour, 
so  many  heathen  souls  passed  into  a  dark  eternity; 
but  we  have  outgrown — or  are,  at  least,  in  process  of 
outgrowing — the  cogency  of  that  consideration,  and 
are  replacing  it  by  the  conviction  that  God,  for  His 
own  gracious  and  wise  purpose,  made  all  things,  and 
in  the  fulness  of  the  time  sent  His  Son  into  the  world 
in  order  that  man  might  be  raised  to  that  pitch  of  per- 
fectness  at  which  he  would  be  adequate  to  the  fulfil- 
ment of  that  purpose.  The  missionary  enterprise  is 
part  of  the  process  of  the  divine  self-fulfilment. 

Nevertheless,  Christianity  can  have  no  claim  to  be 
regarded  as  a  universal  religion  except  it  demonstrate 
that  it  has  points  of  contact  with  universal  humanity; 
nay,  even  more  than  that.  The  Divine  Spirit  has  not 
at  any  time  confined  its  self-manifestation  within  his- 
torical or  geographical  limits.  God  has  never  left  Him- 
self wholly  without  witness  anywhere. 

He  has  sent  the  world  through  a  various  moral 
and  spiritual  discipline  in  order  to  prepare  it  for  His 
perfect  self-manifestation  in  Jesus  Christ.  Judaism 
was  a  part — the  central  part — of  that  discipline;  Greek 
philosophy,  Buddhism,  Confucianism,  were  parts  of  it. 
Even  Islam,  though  subsequent  in  date  to  the  coming 
of  Christ,  with  its  fierce  protest  against  polytheism 
and  idolatry,  must  be  regarded  as  a  part  of  the  age-long 


250        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

historical  discipline  of  the  world  in  preparation  for  the 
revelation  in  Christ.  This  discipline  has  in  all  cases 
fitted  the  variations  of  temperament  and  outlook  which 
have  arisen  in  the  race  by  historical  and  geographical 
circumstances.  Just  as  in  Jewry  the  Law  had  been 
the  pedagogue  to  lead  to  Christ,  so  also  God  sent  to 
other  peoples  other  but  related  words  to  lead  them 
along  the  same  road.  Christianity  can  only  commend 
itself  to  the  world  as  a  universal  religion  by  demon- 
strating that  the  coming  of  Christ  was  the  natural  his- 
torical sequel  of  this  discipline;  and  that  the  preaching 
of  Christ  coheres  with  and  completes  those  other  words 
which  God  has  uttered  to  men  at  many  times  and  in 
many  places;  and  that  it  is  the  inevitable  corollary  of 
the  historical  appearance  of  Jesus  Christ  and  the  per- 
petuation of  the  process  whereby  God's  purpose  in 
the  world  shall  be  achieved  in  the  making  of  that  ulti- 
mate perfected  manhood  which  is  the  goal  of  this  seon. 

What  this  amounts  to,  therefore,  is  a  demand  for  the 
demonstration  of  the  genuine  solidarity  of  humanity — 
not  merely  in  the  physical  region,  but  also  in  the 
primordial  mental  and  spiritual  tendencies  of  universal 
man.  We  may,  of  course,  say  straightway  that  the 
universal  distribution  of  ethical  ideas  demonstrates 
this;  and  while  there  may  be  minor  variations  of  moral 
perspective,  the  moral  sense,  taken  as  a  whole,  works 
along  similar  lines  all  the  world  over;  which  means, 
that  at  bottom  there  is  throughout  the  world  a  funda- 
mental general  agreement  as  to  the  meaning  and  pur- 
pose of  manhood  and  life. 

It  is  to-day  a  scientific  commonplace  that  all  the 
nations  of  men  sprang  from  the  same  common  stock, 
and  that  the  variation  which  we  discern  among  races 


THE  IMPERIALISM  OF  THE  SPIRIT    251 

is  the  inevitable  result  of  certain  historical  and  geo- 
graphical conditions.  It  is  the  fashion  nowadays  to 
insist  upon  the  influence  of  physical  surroundings  upon 
national  character,  and  this  is  hardly  to  be  doubted. 
As  men  multiplied,  the  play  of  physical  forces  on  the 
one  hand,  and  the  action  and  reaction  of  tendencies  and 
affinities  within  the  race  itself,  produced  and  accentu- 
ated those  differences  of  physical  character,  of  intel- 
lectual outlook,  and  of  emotional  sensibility  which 
mark  off  the  nations  from  one  another.  But  when  we 
have  surveyed  the  whole  range  of  differences,  we  come 
back  from  the  four  corners  of  the  earth  to  that  old 
conclusion  of  Greek  philosophy  which  Paul  recorded 
in  his  speech  at  Athens,  and  to  the  same  old  presup- 
position in  Genesis,  that  God  had  made  of  one  all  na- 
tions of  the  earth.  To-day  no  one  questions  the  funda- 
mental solidarity  of  the  human  race.  It  is  proved  by 
the  obvious  fact  that  we  can  learn  each  other's  lan- 
guage. At  bottom,  human  nature  is  always  and  every- 
where the  same. 

But  it  is  not  in  mental  and  physical  character  alone 
that  we  may  perceive  this  essential  solidarity.  The 
substantial  identity  of  the  ethical  ideas  of  the  nations 
proves  that  they  incline  naturally  to  a  like  view  of  the 
ultimate  meaning  of  life.  At  least  the  very  universal- 
ity of  a  moral  sense  proves  the  real  continuity  of  the 
underlying  spiritual  life.  It  is  impossible  to  travel  be- 
yond the  distribution  of  moral  ideas.  It  may  be  true 
that  the  relative  urgency  of  moral  duties  varies  in 
different  places  and  at  different  times;  but  this  is  a 
variation  due  to  difference  of  moral  education.  It  is 
an  altogether  shallow  view  that,  since  some  things  are 
done  openly  and  commonly  in  Peking  which  are  taboo 


252        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

in  London,  there  is  a  fundamental  divergence  of  ethical 
norm  or  of  moral  ideas.  There  is  a  story  told  of  the 
reading  of  the  first  chapter  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Ro- 
mans at  a  street  meeting  in  a  Chinese  city;  and  as  that 
awful  indictment  of  the  heathen  world,  written  nearly 
nineteen  centuries  ago,  was  being  read,  a  man  in  the 
crowd  cried  out,  "  He  is  reading  about  us."  The  sense 
of  sin  is  universal.  The  feeling  of  its  sinfulness  varies 
with  the  distribution  of  moral  light. 

Some  years  back  an  attempt  was  made  to  prove 
that  there  were  nations  on  earth  who  possessed  no 
religion.  The  attempt  failed.  One  may,  of  course, 
succeed  in  demonstrating  this  thesis  by  adopting  a 
private  and  arbitrary  definition  of  religion.  But  there 
can  be  no  question  as  to  the  universal  distribution  of 
religious  feeling.  It  may  express  itself  in  crude  and 
rudimentary  forms;  but  there  is  no  place  on  earth — 
not  even  amongst  the  most  degraded  savages — where 
one  does  not  come  upon  the  sense  of  relationship  to 
some  hidden  superior  powers.  That  is  the  essence  of 
religious  feeling.  Differences  in  the  quality  and  ex- 
pression of  religious  feeling  are  due  to  differences  of 
light,  differences  of  education.  The  religious  sense  is 
universal;  the  purity  and  elevation  of  its  observances 
vary  with  the  measure  of  spiritual  light. 

The  germinal  things  in  humanity  the  world  over  are 
one;  and  if  one  would  know  how  true  this  is,  one  need 
only  consider  the  fundamental  likeness  of  children 
everywhere.  On  a  journey  I  once  undertook  I  had  the 
opportunity  of  watching  the  children  of  many  national- 
ities— French,  Italian,  Greek,  Turkish,  Syrian,  Jewish, 
Arab,  Egyptian — ^and  everywhere  I  saw  the  same  inno- 
cent frankness,  the  same  responsiveness  to  kindness, 


THE  IMPERIALISM  OF  THE  SPIRIT   253 

even  the  same  kinds  of  play  under  local  forms.  In 
infancy  and  childhood  there  is  neither  Jew  nor  Greek, 
nor  barbarian  nor  Scythian,  but  one  common  human- 
ity. In  the  deeper  things  of  life  the  rule  holds  good  in 
maturity  and  old  age.  The  love-songs  and  the  love- 
stories  of  the  whole  world  have  an  undeniable  kinship. 
Men  mourn  their  dead  in  far  Cathay  as  we  do  in  Eng- 
land. We  joy  and  sorrow  and  hope  and  despair  all  the 
world  over.  There  is  no  difference  between  us  in  these 
things. 

And  just  because  of  this  world-wide  solidarity  of 
mankind,  and  of  the  pervasive  and  complete  human 
quality  of  the  Gospel,  Christianity  has  in  it  the  poten- 
tiality of  a  world-wide  empire.  It  is  the  religion  of 
Man,  and  therefore  the  religion  for  all  men.  Islam,  in 
spite  of  its  wide  distribution,  stands  only  partly  upon 
the  universal  characters  of  humanity,  and  for  the  rest 
upon  local  variations;  and  so  it  never  has,  nor  can  it 
ever,  become  a  universal  religion.  The  same  is  true  of 
Buddhism.  It  fits  the  passive  tendencies  of  the  Ori- 
ental. It  has  no  affinity  with  the  strenuous  life  of  the 
Western  world;  while  Christianity  offers  a  genuine 
satisfaction  to  all  the  mystical  and  contemplative  ele- 
ments of  the  human  soul.  Christianity  appeals  not  to 
local  characters  but  to  the  deep  essence  of  humanity; 
it  makes  a  universal  appeal;  more,  it  appropriates  and 
assimilates  to  itself  all  that  is  true  and  genuine  in  the 
thought  and  religious  life  of  every  nation.  In  the  de- 
velopment of  Judaism,  Persian  and  Babylonian  ele- 
ments found  a  place;  and  all  this  was  gathered  up  in 
the  truth  of  the  Gospel.  And  as  the  Gospel  made  its 
way  westward,  it  appropriated  the  best  of  the  culture 
and  thought  of  the  Greek  world.     Stoicism,  which  is 


254        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

the  high-water  mark  of  the  moral  philosophy  of 
Greece,  found  Its  fulfilment — the  satisfaction  of  its 
deepest  demands — in  Christianity.  And  long  after, 
when  the  simplicity  of  Christianity  had  been  obscured 
by  a  desiccated  scholasticism,  its  discovery  and  reas- 
sertion  in  the  Reformation  were  hastened  by  the 
Renaissance,  which  was  itself  just  the  rediscovery  of 
the  best  long- forgotten  learning  of  the  ancient  world. 
The  spirit  of  the  Renaissance  was  called  Humanism; 
it  was  out  of  this  Humanism  that  the  greatest  tri- 
umphs of  Christian  art  emerged,  and  it  was  according 
to  the  fitness  of  things  that  the  Humanists  should  pave 
the  way  for  the  Reformers. 

It  has  already  been  pointed  out  how  the  Gospel 
adapts  itself  to  differences  of  temperament.  The 
strenuous  and  the  contemplative  temperaments  find 
their  inspiration  and  their  food  in  Christianity. 
Thomas  a  Kempis  and  John  Wesley,  Madame  Guyon 
and  Catherine  Howard,  all  alike  drank  at  the  same 
well-springs.  A  difference  of  temperament  is  an  acci- 
dental thing;  it  does  not  belong  to  the  substance  of  our 
life.  The  faith  of  Christ  enters  into  the  substance  and 
adapts  itself  in  every  man  to  what  is  accidental.  Dif- 
ferences of  temperament,  of  racial  outlook,  of  emo- 
tional sensibility — Christianity  develops  them  all  along 
their  true  lines.  This  is  the  reason  why  the  inevitable 
tendency  of  Christianity  is  towards  the  preservation 
of  national  life.  Its  empire  is  not  to  be  a  world-wide 
uniformity.  It  would  be  false  to  all  that  we  know 
of  the  tendency  of  the  energy  of  life,  for  that  makes 
for  variation  and  diversity.  Christianity  does  not 
obliterate  but  confirms  nationality;  and  the  unity  it 
aims  at  is  a  "  unity  of  the  spirit  in  the  bond  of  peace." 


THE  IMPERIALISM  OF  THE  SPIRIT   255 

Japan,  in  the  unthinking  eagerness  of  its  passion  for 
empire,  made  a  deh"berate  attempt  to  suppress  Korean 
nationality;  but  Christianity  has  foiled  Japanese  states- 
manship, and  has  preserved  the  Korean  people.  But 
while  Christianity  does  thus  develop  whatever  is  true 
and  sound  in  the  accidentals  of  human  nature,  it  never- 
theless induces  a  profound  sense  of  unity.  The  strenu- 
ous Luther  loved  the  pensive  Tauler,  and  fed  on  him; 
and  any  ordinary  hymn-book  will  show  how  Christians 
find  a  meeting-place  beneath  their  differences  in  the 
praise  of  Christ.  We  sing  His  praise  in  the  words  of 
Romanists,  Lutherans,  Anglicans,  High  Calvinists, 
Arminians,  Baptists,  and  Presbyterians;  of  ancient 
Greeks  and  Romans,  mediaeval  Germans  and  modern 
Frenchmen.  It  is  in  Jesus  that  we  realize  our  profound 
human  unity. 

We  have  endeavored  to  show  in  a  previous  chapter 
that  the  humanity  of  Jesus  was  a  universal  humanity: 
that  He  belonged  to  no  race  but  to  mankind.  Even  the 
Mohammedans  cannot  do  without  Him.  They  tell 
to-day  a  wonderful  tale  of  how  Issa  will  one  day  come 
again.  The  Brahmo-Somaj  and  similar  movements 
show  how  intelligent  Hinduism  feels  that  it  must  make 
terms  with  Him.  Jesus  is  the  one  human  being  who 
can  find  a  home  anywhere  in  the  world. 

It  is  only  in  the  solidarity  of  the  world-wide  hu- 
manity that  our  manhood  will  come  to  its  true 
fruition.  It  will  take  a  Christian  world  to  produce  the 
superman;  and  it  is  the  business  of  the  Church  to 
make  the  world  Christian,  to  achieve  the  supreme  man- 
hood through  a  world  bound  up  in  a  spiritual  unity 
in  Christ.  The  Church  has  no  meaning  unless  it  be 
here  to  establish  that  world-wide  unity  in  and  through 


256        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

which  we  shall  come  to  the  full-grown  man,  the  meas- 
ure of  the  stature  of  the  fulness  of  Christ.  It  is  to 
capture  the  strenuousness  of  the  Teuton,  the  imagina- 
tion of  the  Celt,  the  vivacity  of  the  Roman  races,  the 
religious  genius  of  the  Semitic  peoples,  the  mysticism 
and  passivity  of  the  Hindu,  the  filial  piety  of  the  China- 
man, the  ambition  of  the  Japanese,  and  lay  them  all 
under  tribute  to  the  purpose  of  God. 

This  is  an  enterprise  "  worthy  a  man's  endeavor," 
and  an  enterprise  the  urgency  of  which  is  multiplied 
beyond  computation  in  our  own  day.  Were  it  China 
alone  that  had  awakened  from  the  torpor  of  ages  in 
these  latter  days,  we  should  have  before  us  in  its 
evangelization  a  task  involving  such  tremendous  Issues 
for  the  world  that  it  would  behove  us  to  move  heaven 
and  earth  to  capture  it  for  Christ.  One  man  in  five  of 
the  population  of  the  whole  world  is  a  Chinaman.  The 
newly  opened  eyes  of  old  China  are  discovering  the 
possibilities  of  a  great  future;  and  in  its  bewilderment 
it  is  looking  to  the  West  for  the  guiding  light.  What 
is  the  West  going  to  give  to  China?  Will  it  be  the 
sterilizing  blight  of  a  greedy  materialism,  the  mother 
of  militarism,  with  all  that  this  contains  of  menace 
to  the  future  welfare  of  the  world?  Or  will  it  be  the 
gift  of  spiritual  idealism  and  of  moral  energy  which 
will  lead  that  ancient  race  with  its  vast,  almost  unex- 
plored, resources  and  its  enormous  potentialities  into 
a  place  of  leadership  in  the  things  that  make  a  true 
manhood?  These  questions  are  relevant  for  the  other 
nations  of  the  Orient  also.  In  Africa  the  menace  of 
Islam  grows  daily.  From  the  whole  world  comes  the 
same  challenge  to  the  Christian  Church. 

The  Church  will  have  less  excuse  to-day  than  ever 


THE  IMPERIALISM  OF  THE  SPIRIT   257 

it  had  for  failing  to  accept  the  challenge.  The  Edin- 
burgh Missionary  Conference  has  changed  the  whole 
aspect  of  the  problem.  We  are  evolving  a  science  of 
missions;  we  know  as  we  never  did  before  the  extent 
and  the  character  of  the  world's  need;  we  never  had 
such  opportunities  of  going  forth  to  satisfy  the  need. 
What  we  need  to-day  is  a  resurgence  of  the  heroic 
daring  temper  of  the  apostolic  age.  There  was  a  little 
Christian  community  then  which  dared  to  look  with 
calm,  aspiring  eyes  abroad  over  the  whole  wild  welter 
of  the  Western  world,  and  to  dream  the  impossible 
dream  of  capturing  it  all  for  the  empire  of  Christ,  and 
then  dared  to  set  out  to  make  the  dream  come  true. 
That  was  at  Antioch;  and  there  issued  from  it  the 
first  missionary  venture.  In  the  mind  of  one  of  the 
missionaries,  Paul,  the  dream  became  a  passion,  and  he 
pursued  it  with  statesmanship  and  enthusiasm  until  the 
name  of  Christ  was  blazed  abroad  even  to  the  "  regions 
beyond."  Sir  W.  M.  Ramsay,  in  his  illuminating  work 
upon  Paul,  shows  how  his  missionary  work  was  carried 
out  on  a  definite  plan.  He  planned  his  journeys,  as  it 
were,  with  a  map  of  the  Roman  Empire  before  him, 
and  it  is  not  perilous  to  conjecture  that  his  ideal  was 
to  use  the  machinery  of  the  empire  to  found  a  church 
co-extensive  with  the  empire.  Paul  thought  "  im- 
perially ";  but  the  shrinkage  of  the  world  through  im- 
proved means  of  intercommunication  has  made  the 
conquest  of  the  world  for  Christ  to-day  a  far  less  am- 
bitious adventure  than  the  winning  of  an  empire  was 
to  Paul.  It  was  said  in  the  previous  chapter  that  the 
appeal  of  the  new  evangelism  would  be  to  the  heroism 
and  the  chivalry  of  men;  and  here  is  an  enterprise 
which  will  need  all  the  courage  and  the  compassion 


258        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

that  the  Church  can  evoke.  Such  an  opportunity  as 
offers  itself  to  it  to-day  will  not  return  for  many  a 
decade.  It  is  the  Church's  hour  of  trial.  Well  might 
the  Edinburgh  Missionary  Conference  say  in  the  ad- 
dress to  the  Christian  churches  already  referred  to, 
that  God  is  calling  us  "  to  a  new  order  of  life  of  a 
more  arduous  and  self-sacrificing  nature  than  the  old  " ; 
and  if  the  Church  fail  in  this  hour,  it  must  mean  that 
it  will  become  a  lifeless  shell,  and  that  Christ  will  find 
for  Himself  elsewhere  a  home,  and  fashion  for  Him- 
seK  another  instrument,  another  true  Church  that  is 
adequate  to  the  need  and  the  challenge  of  the  world. 


XXI 

SOCIAL  RECONSTRUCTION 

THE  impulse  that  is  adequate  to  the  business  of 
Christianizing  the  world  is  also  the  impulse — 
and  the  only  impulse — which  is  sufficient  for 
the  solution  of  the  problems  which  vex  us  at  home; 
and,  indeed,  the  very  presence  of  our  peculiar  domestic 
troubles  is  one  of  the  greatest  hindrances  to  the  evan- 
gelization of  the  world.  When  foreign  observers  see 
the  acres  of  squalid  poverty  which  exist  in  all  our 
populous  centres,  they  argue  that  if  this  is  all  we  can 
show,  after  centuries  of  Christianity,  our  Christianity 
is  not  quite  good  enough  for  them.  It  is  inherent  in 
a  true  imperialism  of  the  Spirit  that  it  will  begin  in 
Jerusalem,  and,  so  far  as  it  may,  remove  the  reproach 
that  it  has  been  a  failure  in  Jerusalem. 

That  the  Church  has  something  to  say  in  respect  of 
obviously  necessary  social  and  economic  readjustments 
in  these  islands  is  beyond  question.  It  is  hardly  to  be 
argued  that  one  reason  why  the  Gospel  makes  so  little 
headway  in  England  is  that  the  cruel  stringency  of  the 
economic  conditions  which  govern  the  life  of  large 
masses  of  our  population  makes  it  practically  impossi- 
ble for  the  Gospel  to  find  foothold  among  them. 
There  is  a  well-known  witty  saying  to  the  effect  that 
no  man  was  ever  saved  with  his  feet  cold;  and  it  is 
undoubtedly  true  that  physical  distress  or  discomfort 

259 


26o        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

does  disable  a  man  from  giving  a  fair  hearing  to  the 
claims  of  Christ.  We  all  know  how  acute  physical 
pain  makes  rank  materialists  of  us,  and  shuts  up  all 
the  avenues  by  means  of  which  spiritual  impressions 
might  reach  us.  It  is  said  that  the  converts  to  Chris- 
tianity in  Judea  in  times  of  famine  are  smaller  in  num- 
ber than  in  times  of  comparative  plenty.  A  writer  in 
"  East  and  West  "  *  reports  a  conversation  in  which  a 
native  woman  was  asked  whether  she  could  account  for 
this;  and  her  answer  virtually  was  that  while  their  chil- 
dren were  dying  of  hunger  and  they  were  themselves 
starving  they  had  no  heart  to  think  of  these  things.  I 
think  that,  while  exceptions  should  be  made  of  indi- 
viduals who  have  heard  and  obeyed  the  call  of  Christ 
despite  the  most  cruel  adverse  physical  circumstances, 
it  is,  nevertheless,  true  that  a  measure  of  security  and 
ease  of  life  is  productive  of,  if  not  actually  necessary 
to,  fair  hearing  and  undistracted  thought  concerning 
the  claims  of  God;  and  this  is  in  itself  adequate  reason 
and  justification  for  the  Church's  concern  for  social 
reform  and  economic  readjustment. 

I  think,  indeed,  that  this  reason  may  be  further 
reinforced  by  a  related  consideration.  Even  if  one 
does  get  so  far  as  kindling  a  spark  of  spiritual  life 
under  the  conditions  that  prevail  in  the  slum,  it  is  hard 
put  to  it  to  keep  up  a  semblance  of  life.  When  our  Lord 
was  here  on  earth.  He  had  to  do  with  people  living  in 
the  neighborhood  of  the  poverty  line,  who  were  in  a 
state  of  chronic  anxiety  concerning  the  necessities  of 
their  daily  life.  The  exactions  of  tax-farmers,  the  ex- 
tortion of  the  ecclesiastical  authorities,  and  other  cir- 
cumstances made   for  a  great  precariousness  In  the 

*  Volume  IV.     Art.  "  Mass  Movements  to  Christ  in  India." 


SOCIAL  RECONSTRUCTION  261 

supply  of  common  daily  needs;  and  these  people  had 
been  crushed  down  by  generations  of  stringent  eco- 
nomic and  political  conditions  into  a  mute  and  limp 
despair.  They  had  no  heart  left  in  them.  He  knew 
that  He  could  make  nothing  of  people  in  that  condi- 
tion. It  is  the  same  problem  that  meets  us  in  the  Lon- 
don slum  to-day — men  who  by  the  sheer  pressure  of 
depressing  conditions  have  become  incapable  of  action, 
of  initiative,  of  decision,  who  live  in  a  vicious  circle  of 
dark,  hopeless  days,  and  have  not  the  pluck  and  heart 
to  extricate  themselves.  The  problem  of  the  London 
slum  is  often  not  so  much  poverty  as  a  kind  of  chronic 
incurable  despair,  a  loss  of  heart,  a  paralysis  of  the  will 
— a  hopelessness  which  has  become  sheer  helplessness. 
That  was  Jesus'  problem  among  the  common  folk  of 
His  day — a  social  and  personal  depression  which  put 
men  out  of  action  in  the  economic  struggle  and  made 
them  incapable  of  responding  to  spiritual  appeals. 

But  there  is  a  profound  difference  between  the  con- 
ditions that  Jesus  faced  and  those  which  challenge  us — 
namely,  the  enormously  increased  complexity  of  the 
modern  situation.  After  all,  in  the  simple  social 
organization  of  our  Lord's  day  there  was  enough  room 
left  for  a  man  to  stand  fighting  his  own  battle  if  only 
he  could  be  inoculated  with  the  pluck  and  the  will  to  do 
so.  There  were  avenues  of  escape;  there  were  loop- 
holes in  the  social  economy  through  which  a  man  with 
grit  might  pass  into  self-respect  and  independence,  even 
to  wealth,  at  least  to  ease  and  sufficiency  of  life.  But 
in  a  complex  civilization  like  ours  the  meshes  are  much 
finer  and  the  opportunities  of  the  individual  to  fight 
for  recovery  and  independence  are  much  fewer.  Even 
though  you  inoculate  strength  and  courage  into  a  man. 


262         THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

he  may  yet  find  himself  beaten  in  the  struggle  for 
sufficiency  and  respectability  of  life.  There  are  a  few 
who  do  win  through;  but  one  has  known  men  delivered 
from  the  toils  of  drunkenness  who  have  made  a  brave 
fight  to  extricate  themselves  from  the  tangle  of  poverty 
and  depression  into  which  they  have  fallen,  yet  who 
have  been  foiled  again  and  again  by  scarcity  of  work, 
by  their  own  lack  of  a  definite  trade,  by  their  inability 
to  meet  the  increased  financial  demands  of  living  in  a 
more  wholesome  neighborhood,  and  other  related  cir- 
cumstances. So  the  problem  of  the  Church  to-day, 
which  was  the  problem  of  Jesus  in  His  day,  is  com- 
plicated by  this  further  factor — this  necessity  for  social 
and  economic  readjustments  which  will  at  least  make 
possible  a  moderate  sufficiency  and  security  of  the 
means  of  independent  and  self-respecting  life.  We 
must  secure  such  measure  of  social  reorganization  as 
will  make  it  possible  for  the  man  who  has  the  grit  and 
the  will  to  do  it,  to  recover  a  place  as  a  respectable 
member  of  society,  to  extricate  himself  from  the 
meshes  of  that  social  maladjustment  which  is  responsi- 
ble for  the  misery  and  the  squalor  and  the  poverty  and 
the  slumdom  of  the  great  city. 

But  we  have  not  in  saying  so  much  exhausted  the 
grounds  of  the  Church's  legitimate  concern  for  social 
reform.  The  very  fact  that  the  Church  stands  for  a 
human  ideal  implies  that  it  stands  also  for  a  social 
ideal.  No  one  does  indeed  deny  that;  but  there  are 
those  who  hold  that  the  social  ideal  can  only  be  realized 
indirectly  through  the  regeneration  of  individuals. 
That,  however,  is  only  half  the  truth.  The  regenerated 
individual,  no  doubt,  does  modify  his  social  environ- 
ment; but  we  cannot  possibly  achieve  a  transformed 


SOCIAL  RECONSTRUCTION  263 

society  without  transforming  the  influences  which  pro- 
duce the  modern  social  chaos.  No  doubt  the  ideal 
commonwealth  will  be  a  commonwealth  of  ideal  men; 
but  one  can  no  more  have  ideal  men  without  an  ideal 
commonwealth  than  an  ideal  commonwealth  without 
ideal  men.  The  foundations  of  society  must  be 
changed  pari  passu  with  the  character  of  the  individual. 
Social  regeneration  must  go  hand  in  hand  with  per- 
sonal regeneration.  The  Church  has  not  only  a  message 
for  the  individual;  it  has  also  something  to  say  to  the 
whole  society  in  which  the  individual  lives.  It  is 
underestimating  the  demoralizing  influence  of  evil  and 
unjust  external  conditions  to  imagine  otherwise. 

No  one  who  reads  the  Scriptures  understandingly 
can  fail  to  realize  how  quick  the  social  consciousness 
of  their  outstanding  figures  was.  In  Israel  our  very 
knowledge  of  social  conditions  arises  from  the  de- 
nunciation by  the  prophets  of  social  abuses  and  op- 
pression. Drunkenness,  land-grabbing,  corners  in 
food,  unjust  weights  and  measures — these  and  many 
more  things  existed  in  Israel,  and  we  know  how  the 
prophets  spoke  of  them.  It  is  true  that  in  the  New 
Testament  there  is  less  denunciation  of  such  abuses. 
But  the  sufficient  reason  for  this  lay  in  the  fact  that 
there  was  little  use  in  denouncing  oppression  to  those 
who  were  suffering  oppression.  The  Gospel  was 
preached  to  the  poor,  and  brought  life  and  faith  and 
hope  back  to  hearts  out  of  which  these  things  had 
been  crushed  by  political  oppression  and  ecclesiastical 
tyranny.  What  Jesus  aimed  first  of  all  at  doing  was  to 
induce  self-respect  and  self-confidence  in  the  oppressed 
and  heavy-laden  populace  of  Palestine;  and  He  did  this 
to  such  real  purpose  that  out  of  that  hopeless  mass  He 


264        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

raised  men  who  defied  the  world.  His  mission  was  to 
redeem  and  re-create  manhood;  and  that  is  admittedly 
the  first  step  always  in  the  solution  of  any  human 
problem.  The  clear  social  implicates  of  His  teaching 
may  be  gathered  from  the  fact  that  the  first  community 
of  disciples,  already  held  together  by  a  common  spirit- 
ual bond,  endeavored  to  strengthen  their  organization 
by  giving  it  an  economic  basis.  The  attempt  was  a 
failure.  Isolated  communisms  from  the  very  nature 
of  things  must  fail,  as  they  have  always  done.  And 
in  any  case,  persecution  dissolved  the  little  Jerusalem 
community  with  deadly  effect.  But  this  did  not  prevent 
the  Church  from  realizing  and  endeavoring  to  dis- 
charge its  social  obligations.  Its  organization  of 
philanthropy  became  very  wide  and  effective;  so  much 
so,  indeed,  that  one  of  the  Roman  emperors  set  up  a 
rival  relief  agency,  so  that  the  Romans  should  not  be 
put  to  shame  by  the  Christians.  It  is  from  the  early 
Christian  Church  that  we  have  inherited  the  hospital 
and  orphanage,  and  though  the  last  word  has  yet  to 
be  spoken  on  hospital  and  orphanage  policy  and  man- 
agement, yet  they  have  served  mankind  with  splendid 
and  signal  distinction.  If  we  come  down  to  more  re- 
cent times,  we  have  the  spectacle  of  the  Church  leading 
the  State  in  the  matter  of  social  reform.  Our  English 
Poor  Law  is  a  very  poor  thing,  and  wants  that  reform 
which  we  are  all  hoping  it  may  soon  have.  But  it  em- 
bodies the  principle  that  it  is  the  duty  of  the  State  as  a 
collective  body  to  care  for  its  helpless  poor;  and  the 
State  learnt  that  lesson  from  the  Church.  Elementary 
education  was  first  of  all  taken  up  by  the  Church,  and 
the  Church  has  passed  it  on  to  the  State.  Other  in- 
stances might  be  given;  but  these  are  sufficient  to  show 


SOCIAL  RECONSTRUCTION  265 

that  the  Church  has  exercised  a  vast  social  reaction 
during  its  history. 

The  Church  has  of  late  years  been  greatly  criticised 
because  it  has  ceased  to  exercise  any  perceptible  influ- 
ence upon  social  progress,  and  the  criticism  is  not  with- 
out much  justification.  But  there  are  sufficient  ex- 
planations of  this  inactivity,  even  if  they  do  not  excuse 
it.  The  reaction  from  the  latitudinarian  lethargy  of 
the  early  seventeenth  century  was  one  of  the  after- 
maths of  the  Protestant  Reformation.  There,  it  was 
the  rights  of  the  individual  in  the  sphere  of  religion 
and  the  conscience  that  were  established;  and  the  indi- 
vidualistic principle  was  in  the  ascendant,  giving  its 
color  to  men's  religious  conceptions,  and  finally  receiv- 
ing its  political  expression  in  the  French  Revolution. 
The  swing  of  the  historical  pendulum  is  exceedingly 
slow,  and  it  was  not  until  a  half -century  after  the 
French  Revolution  that  both  in  Church  and  State  in 
England  the  individualistic  emphasis  began  to  be  bal- 
anced by  a  growing  social  conscience.  But  during  this 
period  British  industry  had  been  conducted  on  a  basis 
of  unqualified  individualism,  with  the  result  that  a 
great  mass  of  poverty  and  distress  had  been  created. 
Good  men  thought  that  all  this  might  be  adequately 
dealt  with  by  means  of  philanthropic  activity;  but  it 
could  not.  In  spite  of  the  great  increase  of  philan- 
thropic agencies,  there  are  still  men,  women,  and  chil- 
dren dying  of  starvation  in  our  midst.  But  the  his- 
torical pendulum  has  swung  so  far  by  to-day  that  there 
is  no  church  in  this  country,  I  believe,  which  has  not 
its  society  or  guild  for  social  service  and  the  study  of 
social  problems.  In  America  there  is,  under  the  aus- 
pices of  the  Home  Mission  Committee  of  the  Presby- 


266        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

terian  Church,  what  is  called  a  Department  of  Church 
and  Labor.  The  aim  of  this  institution  is  to  interpret 
working  men  to  the  Church  and  the  Church  to  work- 
ing men;  and  it  endeavors  to  spread  information  upon 
social  problems  among  its  own  members  and  to  create 
a  real  sympathy  between  Christian  leaders  and  the 
leaders  of  social  reform;  at  the  same  time  it  seeks  to 
present  the  Church  and  its  mission  in  the  true  light  to 
those  who  are  outside  it  and  misunderstand  it.  I  do 
not  think  that  there  is  any  doubt  at  all  that  the  Church 
to-day  is  recovering  its  social  conscience,  if  not  in  a 
very  extensive  fashion  as  yet,  nevertheless  in  a  very 
real  and  intelligent  and  increasing  way. 

It  should  be  said  here  that  the  Church,  whatsoever 
its  passion  for  social  progress  may  be,  has  no  right, 
except  under  very  exceptional  circumstances,  to  take 
political  action — that  is,  in  a  party  sense.  Whenever 
the  Church  has  obtruded  itself  into  the  political  arena 
as  a  partisan,  it  has  always  hurt  itself,  and  its  influence 
has  not  been  good.  Here  we  are  not  so  much  inde- 
pendent of  political  parties  as  above  them.  Our  main 
business  Is  to  make  our  common  social  conscience  as 
Christian  men  and  women  articulate  and  clear;  to 
create  and  foster  a  public  opinion  in  Its  favor,  and 
insist  upon  its  recognition  in  the  organization  of  our 
social  life  on  every  side.  Our  great  and  immediate 
need  is  to  do  some  clear  thinking  upon  the  constituent 
elements  of  this  social  conscience  so  that  we  may  know 
what  we  are  about. 

Let  us  take  one  instance.  We  recognize  it  as  a 
Christian  duty  to  relieve  poverty.  We  have  done  so 
through  the  ages ;  and  it  is  right  that  we  should.  And 
we  have  and  shall  have  the  poor  with  us  always.    There 


SOCIAL  RECONSTRUCTION  267 

will  always — or  at  any  rate  for  a  long  time — be  a  pro- 
portion of  people  whose  poverty  is  the  legitimate  sub- 
ject of  Christian  charity.  But  it  is  our  duty  to  help 
to  limit  this  proportion  to  the  lowest  possible  dimen- 
sions. That  is  to  say,  because  we  conceive  it  our  duty 
to  relieve  poverty,  logically  it  is  our  duty  also  to  re- 
move the  causes  of  poverty.  A  doctor  is  not  merely 
content  with  relieving  pain.  He  tries  to  remove  the 
causes  of  pain.  It  is  the  reasonable  thing  to  do.  So 
that  our  function  in  relation  to  poverty  extends  not 
merely  to  the  charity  which  relieves  it,  but  also  to  an 
inquiry  into  the  causes  of  poverty,  and  the  demand  that, 
where  those  causes  are  remediable  or  removable,  that 
remedy  or  removal  shall  be  resorted  to. 

With  the  ways  and  means  whereby  this  end  can 
best  be  attained  the  Church  has  only  a  secondary  con- 
cern. That  is  a  question  for  political  scientists,  and 
economists.  What  the  Church  is  first  of  all  concerned 
with  is  to  apply  the  test  of  its  own  ethical  principles 
to  the  conditions  and  circumstances  out  of  which  this 
removable  poverty  arises,  and  demand  that  they  shall 
be  reformed  and  readjusted  conformably  with  those 
principles;  to  create  and  evoke  a  body  of  enlightened 
public  opinion  in  favor  of  this  amelioration  that  will 
compel  politician  and  economist  to  set  up  the  necessary 
machinery  to  secure  it. 

Now,  as  we  have  seen,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that 
the  Church  is  moving  with  increasing  momentum  in 
this  direction,  and  to  a  great  extent  is  beginning  to  out- 
live the  suspicion  that  its  main  concern  was  to  defend 
and  preserve  the  existing  conditions.  But  it  is  hardly 
to  be  asserted  yet  that  the  Church  has  discovered  or 
uttered  the  entire  word  which  it  is  its  right  and  re- 


268        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

sponsibility  to  utter  in  this  connection.  It  is  still,  to  a 
great  extent,  in  the  bondage  of  vested  interests,  and  is 
fearful  of  stating  in  clear,  round,  plain  terms  the  pri- 
macy of  humanity  over  property.  But  it  will  overcome 
this  timidity  as  there  comes  to  it  a  renewed  sense  of  its 
distinct  mission  in  the  world.  It  will  have  to  pay  the 
price  of  plain  utterance;  it  will  alienate  a  large  pro- 
portion of  the  wealthier  classes.  It  may  find  it — and 
probably  will  find  it — its  duty  to  impugn  frankly  and 
without  qualification  the  basis  of  our  social  organiza- 
tion, and  declare  that  the  industrial  and  commercial 
individualism  which  has  created  present  conditions  is  a 
contradiction  and  a  violation  of  Christian  principle  and 
of  the  law  of  God.  Not  that  it  will  embrace  economic 
socialism — for  an  economic  socialism  may  be  as  far 
removed  from  its  ideal  as  an  economic  individualism. 
Socialism  may  be  and  frequently  is  as  materialistic  as 
individualism.  The  controversy  between  socialism  and 
individualism  may  be  no  more  than  the  conflict  of 
rival  theories  of  the  distribution  of  wealth — a  conflict 
of  personal  individualism  and  class  individualism. 
Both  alike  are  the  denial  of  the  fundamental  Christian 
ethic.  Economics  is  a  division  of  the  science  of  human 
relationships,  a  department  of  ethics;  and  the  char- 
acter of  economic  doctrine  will  be  first  determined  by 
its  background  of  ethical  postulates.  If  these  ethical 
postulates  are  consistent  with  the  spiritual  mission  of 
the  Church,  if  they  embody  the  ethical  standpoint  of 
Christianity,  then  the  Church  has  no  more  to  say  to  the 
economic  doctrines  which  may  be  formulated  nor  even 
to  the  differences  of  opinion  which  may  arise  concern- 
ing them.  But  if  these  ethical  postulates  are  those  of 
materialism,  then  the  Church  can  give  no  quarter  to 


SOCIAL  RECONSTRUCTION  269 

the  doctrines  which  may  be  evolved  nor  to  the  schools 
of  economic  thought  which  may  arise  out  of  different 
views  concerning  them.  What  the  Church  is  con- 
cerned with  is  that  the  economic  doctrines  which  are 
accepted  as  authoritative  should  be  consistent  with  that 
view  of  humanity  and  human  development  for  which  it 
stands. 

This  is  indeed  the  way  in  which  it  should  regard  all 
the  questions  which  are  entailed  in  the  conduct  of  a 
nation's  affairs.  The  implicit  assumption  of  politics  is 
that  there  is  somewhere  an  ideal  commonwealth;  and 
our  political  conduct,  our  political  opinions,  will  be 
determined  by  the  kind  of  character  we  may  ascribe 
to  this  ideal  commonwealth.  When  we  differ  about 
the  character  of  the  ideal  commonwealth,  we  shall 
differ  also  in  political  opinion  and  political  conduct. 
But  while  we  may  agree  about  the  ideal  common- 
wealth, the  kind  of  nation  that  we  want  to  make,  we 
may  differ  about  the  way  of  realizing  it;  and  so  we 
shall  differ  again  in  our  political  opinions  and  our  po- 
litical conduct.  What  we  all  agree  about  is  that  we 
want  our  commonwealth  to  be  the  best  possible;  but 
beyond  that  we  differ  endlessly. 

I  think  that  a  good  deal  of  our  trouble  in  this  direc- 
tion arises  from  the  fact  that  we  do  not  carry  our  think- 
ing far  enough  back.  We  accept  the  traditional  po- 
litical distinctions  as  fundamental  things,  as  a  constant 
variable;  and  I  am  perfectly  sure  that  a  man  who 
will  carry  his  thinking  far  enough  back  will  sit  there- 
after far  more  loosely  to  his  existing  partisanships 
than  he  did  before.  The  first  necessity  in  political 
reconstruction  is  to  settle  in  our  minds  what  the  ideal 
commonwealth  really  is.    Until  we  have  fixed  that  we 


270        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

shall  go  on  fighting  in  the  dark.  I  do  not  say  that 
we  are  to  formulate  a  Utopia  in  which  every  detail  is 
already  planned  and  fixed,  but  we  must  reach  a  definite 
conception  of  the  general  character  of  the  national  life 
which  we  want  to  build  up. 

It  is  at  this  point  that  the  Church's  point  of  view 
comes  in.  For,  broadly  speaking,  there  are  just  two 
kinds  of  political  ideal — materialistic  and  spiritual. 
The  one  will  regard  the  end  of  national  life  in  terms  of 
power;  the  other  in  terms  of  manhood.  The  imperial- 
ism of  the  one  will  be  commercial;  of  the  other,  hu- 
manitarian. The  one  will  seek  territorial  expansion 
for  the  sake  of  what  it  can  get  out  of  it;  the  other, 
for  the  sake  of  what  it  can  do  for  it.  The  one  counts 
the  wealth  of  the  nation  in  its  reserves  of  gold;  the 
other,  in  its  resources  of  manhood.  The  one  regards 
the  end  of  national  life  as  the  making  of  the  money  and 
the  security  of  property;  the  other,  as  the  making  of 
men  and  the  safeguarding  of  manhood.  Now,  let  it 
be  at  once  said  that  we  must  have  reserves  of  gold  as 
well  as  resources  of  manhood.  The  question  is,  which 
is  to  come  first — which  is  to  be  the  dominating  and 
controlling  interest?  I  do  not  hesitate  to  say  that  all 
the  political  parties  of  this  country  and  of  the  West 
generally  put  the  wrong  thing  first.  Though  some  of 
us  may  ostensibly  put  manhood  in  the  forefront,  all  it 
comes  to  is  a  demand  for  the  reorganization  of  the 
resources  of  wealth  so  as  to  raise  the  general  average 
of  material  comfort.  We  are  all  frankly  political  ma- 
terialists— with  possibly  here  and  there  a  few  accessory 
ideals  of  a  more  spiritual  sort  tacked  on.  We  all  virtu- 
ally want  the  same  kind  of  commonwealth,  and  it  is 
the  wrong  kind. 


SOCIAL  RECONSTRUCTION  271 

I  know,  of  course,  the  answer  that  will  be  proposed 
to  this  view.  It  will  be  said  that  a  nation,  like  a  man, 
must  live  before  it  can  live  well.  It  is  true  that  a  man 
must  begin  to  live  in  order  to  live  well,  but  he  can 
only  keep  on  living  by  living  well.  It  is  the  same  with 
nations.  They  must  exist  before  they  can  exist  for 
the  right  ends,  but  they  will  not  exist  for  long  unless 
they  do  exist  for  the  right  ends.  We  have  national 
existence.  The  question  is,  How  are  we  to  preserve 
and  develop  it?  Is  it  by  spending  our  chief  energies 
upon  material  ends?  Is  it  by  organizing  our  life  so  as 
to  increase  our  stock  of  material  wealth  ?  The  nation 
which  deliberately  does  that  is  signing  its  own  death- 
warrant.  It  is  staking  its  life  upon  a  perishable  and 
transitory  thing.  That  is  what  the  great  empires  of 
history  staked  their  lives  upon,  and  they  have  disap- 
peared. So  long  as  we  allow  the  conduct  of  our  affairs 
to  be  dominated  by  commercial,  or  territorial,  or  any 
other  kind  of  material  ambition,  we  stand  in  jeopardy 
every  hour. 

And  more  than  this :  so  long  as  our  interest  In  man- 
hood works  out  in  no  more  than  a  demand  for  a  more 
even  distribution  of  wealth  in  order  to  raise  the  general 
average  of  comfort,  we  are  still  off  the  main  track. 
It  is  a  good  thing,  no  doubt,  to  secure  this;  but  it 
is  a  side  issue.  We  are  not  out  in  order  to  make  a 
nation  of  healthy  and  vigorous  human  animals,  though 
we  should  have  that  in  view  as  one  of  our  by-products. 
If  that  be  all  that  we  are  seeking,  we  merely  conceive 
of  man  as  having  a  certain  economic  value;  and  the 
healthier  and  stronger  he  is,  the  more  valuable  he  is 
from  an  economic  standpoint.  The  tendency  of  our 
time  is  even  worse  than  this;  the  value  that  we  attach 


272        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

to  the  improvement  of  physical  conditions  is  that  it 
makes  a  man  a  more  efficient  fighting  machine.  But 
has  a  man  no  other  value  than  an  economic  or  a  fight- 
ing value?  Is  he  no  more  than  that?  The  aim  of 
national  life  is  the  making  of  manhood,  of  real  man- 
hood, which  is  a  spiritual  manhood,  a  moral  manhood ; 
and  this  is  the  thing  which  should  dominate  our  po- 
litical criticism  and  our  political  action.  We  want  to 
make  a  manhood  which  will  express  itself  and  find  its 
satisfactions,  not  in  materialistic  achievements,  but  in 
the  immortality  of  a  noble  literature,  a  worthy  art,  in 
high  social  conduct,  and  in  an  exalted  national  char- 
acter, and  we  must  be  prepared  to  subordinate  every- 
thing to  that — yes,  and  to  sacrifice  some  things  alto- 
gether to  it.  What  we  want  is,  not  an  empire  that 
girdles  the  earth  in  order  to  provide  us  with  an  expand- 
ing market,  but  an  empire  which  shall  enable  us  to 
produce  a  higher  type  of  manhood  in  the  world.  We 
need  to  transfigure  our  political  aims  by  baptizing  them 
in  a  spiritual  idealism;  for  this  is  the  only  way  of 
securing  political  opinions  and  political  conduct  which 
will  make  for  the  stability  and  permanence  and  growth 
of  a  true  national  life.  We  can  only  secure  the  future 
of  England  by  throwing  overboard  our  present  bread- 
and-butter  politics  and  approaching  the  problems  of 
our  national  life  with  the  spiritual  mind,  which  is  the 
mind  of  Christ.  We  require  a  new  spirit  in  our 
politics — this  spiritual  idealism;  and  when  we  have 
achieved  that,  the  acrimony  and  bitterness  which  dis- 
figure our  political  controversies  will  be  lost  in  the 
sense  that  beneath  all  our  differences  of  opinion  and 
conduct  we  are  seeking  a  common  aim — that  we  are 
involved,  not  in  a  mere  partisan  joust,  but  in  the  most 


SOCIAL  RECONSTRUCTION  273 

fruitful  of  all  co-operation,  the  hearty  conflict  of  opin- 
ions sincerely  held. 

It  is,  therefore,  the  business  of  the  Church  to  stand 
over  above  the  conflict  of  political  doctrines  and  to 
insist  without  compromise  upon  imposing  its  own  ideals 
upon  them.  When  the  Church  or  any  part  of  it  makes 
itself  a  partisan  of  any  political  group,  it  is  lowering 
its  flag  and  coming  down  from  its  proper  place.  So 
long  as  our  politics  and  economics  are  dominated  by 
materialistic  views  of  life  and  ways  of  thought,  the 
Church  must  not  merely  stand  aloof,  but  must  come 
into  the  arena  and  fight  them  all,  giving  them  no  quar- 
ter. If  need  be,  it  must  carry  the  spiritual  banner  into 
the  very  legislatures.  The  doctrine  that  national  exist- 
ence depends  upon  physical  force  may  be  true  in  the 
present  state  of  the  world;  but  that  is  no  reason  why 
the  Church  should  acquiesce  in  it.  History  should  have 
taught  us  by  now  how  utterly  perishable  is  the  empire 
which  rests  upon  force;  but  we  are  very  loth  to  learn 
the  lesson,  and  it  is  part  of  the  mission  of  the  Church 
in  the  world  to  maintain  a  continuous  protest  against 
this  doctrine,  to  declare  that  it  is  true  to-day  as  it  was 
of  old  that  nations  live,  "  not  by  might,  nor  by  power, 
but  by  My  Spirit,  saith  the  Lord,"  and  to  seek  to  inocu- 
late the  nation  with  this  spirit.  In  the  inner  life  of 
the  nation  it  will  insist  that  all  reform  shall  be  regarded 
as  preliminary  to  the  development  of  the  spiritual  life. 
It  will  bless  Old  Age  Pensions,  Insurance  schemes 
against  invalidity  and  unemployment,  not  merely  be- 
cause they  add  security  and  ease  and  comfort  to  the 
lives  of  large  multitudes  of  men,  not  merely  because 
they  indicate  a  spirit  of  collective  philanthropy  in  the 
State,  but  because  by  bringing  security  and  larger  ease 


274        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

of  life  they  deliver  men  from  those  distractions  which 
prevent  them  from  giving  ear  to  the  quickening  Word 
of  God,  and  from  those  physical  limitations  which 
hinder  their  spiritual  development,  and  because,  there- 
fore, they  help  in  the  process  of  evolving  the  real 
superman  and  all  his  works,  the  ascending  effort  of  art 
and  love,  and  the  enlarging  peace  and  joy  of  life. 


XXII 

THE  SPIRITUAL  MIND  AT  WORK 

THE  present  generation  would  owe  an  immeasur- 
able debt  to  Rudolf  Eucken  were  it  only  for 
the  fact  that  he  has  recalled  it  to  its  duty  to 
look  behind  the  philosophies  and  the  fashions  of 
thought  which  it  has  inherited  and  which  it  is  still 
evolving,  and  to  inquire  concerning  their  origin — as  it 
were  to  turn  their  own  methods  upon  themselves  and 
to  examine  them  in  their  own  light. 

What  is  philosophy?  It  is  simply  the  attempt  of 
the  mind  to  answer  certain  primitive  and  unchanging 
questions.  When  man  found  himself  in  the  world, 
there  were  some  questions  which  immediately  chal- 
lenged him.  What  was  he?  What  was  the  world  he 
found  around  him?  What  is  the  meaning  of  it,  of 
himself?  Is  there  anything  beyond  what  he  can  see 
and  feel?  This  whole  scheme  of  things — what  does 
it  signify?  Philosophy  arose  out  of  the  endeavor  to 
answer  these  questions.  The  first  philosopher  an- 
swered them  in  one  way.  Then  another  came  along 
and  said  that  the  first  philosopher's  answer  was  wrong 
— that  he  had  gone  about  the  matter  in  the  wrong 
way.  Then  a  third  came  and  criticised  the  other  two, 
and  propounded  his  own  answer.  It  was  only  the  an- 
swers that  differed.  Beneath  all  the  fashions  of  think- 
ing, and  the  differences  of  answer,  there  was  some- 

275 


276        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

thing  which  kept  on  asking  the  same  old  questions. 
And  it  is  asking  them  still,  and  philosophy  is  still  try- 
ing to  discover  the  answer.  Let  me  point  out  in  pass- 
ing that  what  appears  on  the  outside  to  be  the  conflict 
of  schools  of  thought  is  really  not  a  conflict,  but  a 
succession  of  minds  engaged  in  the  same  pursuit,  seek- 
ing to  answer  the  same  questions.  The  history  of 
philosophy  is  not  the  history  of  age-long  controversy. 
It  is  the  history — when  we  read  it  deeply  enough — of 
age-long  co-operation.  Not  a  fruitless  co-operation  in 
some  senses,  but  fruitless  so  far  as  the  main  quest  is 
concerned.  For  there  are  to-day  being  propounded  as 
many  different  kinds  of  answers  as  there  ever  were. 
There  are  as  many  schools  of  philosophy  as  at  any 
previous  period  of  history.  So  far  as  philosophy  is 
concerned,  the  critic  is  entitled  to  say  that  we  are  as 
far  away  from  the  final  answer  to  our  questioning  as 
we  ever  were. 

Which  means  that  we  must  give  up  our  hope,  if  ever 
we  cherished  it,  that  philosophy  will  solve  our  prob- 
lems and  furnish  us  with  that  synthesis  which  we  re- 
quire. And  if  philosophy  fails,  still  more  must  phys- 
ical science  fail.  For,  whatever  discoveries  science 
may  yet  make,  it  can  do  no  more  than  furnish  a  certain 
number  of  the  additional  data ;  and  it  must  pass  on  the 
business  of  drawing  the  ultimate  inferences  to  the 
philosopher.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  science  has  made 
the  task  of  the  philosopher  much  more  difficult.  It 
has  made  it  infinitely  more  complicated;  it  presented 
the  philosopher,  it  is  true,  with  a  theory  of  evolution, 
but  that  only  multiplied  and  accentuated  the  challenge 
and  left  the  philosopher  as  far  away  as  ever  from  a 
way  out  of  the  last  puzzling  stages  of  his  labyrinth. 


THE  SPIRITUAL  MIND  AT  WORK      277 

He  guessed  more  vigorously  for  a  time — that  was  all. 
He  certainly  guessed  no  more  successfully  so  far  as 
the  deep  old  ultimate  questions  are  concerned.  In- 
deed, Bergson's  subtle  and  remorseless  analysis  is 
showing  how  utterly  inadequate  all  mechanistic  and 
finalistic  explanations  are,  even  of  phenomena  that 
lie  much  nearer  home  to  the  scientific  mind  than  the 
great  ultimate  problems. 

Neither  speculative  nor  scientific  thought  promises 
us  any  relief.  Does  it  not  appear,  then,  that  they  give 
way  by  default  to  the  spiritual  interpretation  of  things 
— to  that  point  of  view  which  we  gain  when  we  permit 
that  something  within  us  which  enshrines  our  ultimate 
problem,  and  from  which  these  age-long  questions 
start,  to  become  something  more  than  a  topic  for 
thinking — to  become,  that  is,  our  very  life?  For  that 
something  is  continuous  with  the  universal  spirit, 
suppressed  and  cramped  by  the  environment  of  flesh, 
but  capable  of  emancipation  and  of  becoming  our  real 
self-hood.  What  we  want  is,  not  a  new  kind  of 
thought  that  shall  start  us  on  a  new  way  of  life,  but  a 
new  way  of  life  which  shall  make  us  capable  of  a  new 
kind  of  thought.  We  want,  that  is,  a  new  angle  for 
our  thinking,  and  that  can  only  come  through  the 
triumphant  resurgence  in  us  of  a  genuine  spiritual  life, 
through  the  emancipation  of  that  germinal  spiritu- 
ality which  we  all  possess  and  its  enthronement  over 
the  whole  kingdom  of  life. 

The  spiritual  life  brings  with  it  the  spiritual  mind, 
or,  as  Paul  calls  it,  the  mind  of  Christ ;  and  it  is  clear, 
from  what  Paul  says  in  i  Corinthians,  that  he  regards 
it  as  the  counterpart  in  us  of  the  mind  of  God.  The 
spiritual  point  of  view  which  comes  to  us  with  the 


278        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

spiritual  life  is  the  divine  and  therefore  the  ultimate 
point  of  view.  It  gives  a  new  angle  for  our  thinking, 
a  new  standard  of  criticism,  a  new  method  of  analysis 
and  construction.  As  we  have  already  seen,  it  fur- 
nishes a  distinctive  mode  of  approach  to  our  political 
and  social  problems ;  it  does  the  same  thing  in  respect 
of  literature,  art,  music,  education,  and  the  whole 
range  of  our  intellectual  and  aesthetic  activities.  There 
is  little,  as  we  have  seen,  that  our  own  time  is  more 
urgently  in  need  of  than  this  single  sustained  point 
of  view  in  all  the  departments  of  life.  Mr.  Alfred 
Noyes  (whose  poems  more  than  those  of  any  recent 
poet,  except  perhaps  Francis  Thompson,  reflect  in  a 
thoroughgoing  way  the  spiritual  mind)  in  a  recent 
article  has  some  searching  things  to  say  upon  this 
point : — 

"  The  old  completeness  of  view,  the  old  single- 
hearted  synthesis  which  saw  the  complex  world  in  its 
essential  unity,  saw  it  steadily  and  saw  it  whole,  man 
as  a  soul  and  a  body,  life  and  death  as  a  march  to  im- 
mortality, and  the  universe  as  a  miracle  with  a  single 
meaning,  all  that  white  light  of  vision  has  been  broken 
up  into  a  thousand  prismatic  and  shifting  reflections. 
We  arc  in  danger  of  losing  the  white  light,  not  because 
it  is  no  longer  there,  but  because  the  age  has  grown 
so  vast  that  we  cannot  co-ordinate  its  multifarious 
and  multi-colored  rays.  Analysis  has  gone  so  far 
that  we  are  in  danger  of  intellectual  disintegration. 
It  is  time  to  make  some  synthesis,  or  we  shall  find 
ourselves  wandering  through  a  world  without  mean- 
ing." * 

It  is  not  difficult  to  trace  the  origin  of  this  con- 
*  Fortnightly  Review,  July,  1911. 


THE  SPIRITUAL  MIND  AT  WORK      279 

fusion.  It  is  to  be  discovered  in  the  development  of 
scientific  thought  and  the  breaking  up  of  the  old  tradi- 
tional syntheses — for  which  science  has  been  power- 
less to  provide  substitutes.  It  is  not,  of  course,  on  the 
scientific  side  alone  that  this  breaking  away  from  the 
traditional  views  has  taken  place;  but  the  scientific 
revolt  has  been  taken  as  a  justification  for  breaking 
away  on  the  other  sides  as  well;  and  in  consequence 
we  are  involved  to-day  in  an  individualism  and  an 
anarchy  of  thought  which  makes  the  kingdom  of  the 
intellect  a  vast  wilderness.  It  is  probably  true  that 
this  has  been  inevitable;  but  it  is  also  true  that  it 
cannot  be  allowed  to  continue.  Intellectual  disintegra- 
tion means,  in  the  long  run,  the  disintegration  of  the 
nation,  the  dissolution  of  civilization :  for  intellectual 
disintegration  is  a  symptom  of  a  lost  vision,  and  where 
there  is  no  vision  the  people  perish.  The  mind  must 
be  recalled  to  the  base,  and  it  must  be  made  impossible 
for  it  to  embark  on  independent  and  eccentric  adven- 
tures, without  reference  to  a  steady,  sustained  ideal. 
The  only  way  in  which  this  can  be  done  is  to  preach 
and  to  accept  and  to  insist  upon  a  spiritual  idealism 
which  shall  be  pervasive  and  persuasive  enough  to 
lead  all  life  into  its  obedience.  But  before  this  can  be 
done  we  must  frankly  get  back  to  that  primordial 
thing  which  underlies  all  our  intellectual  processes, 
which  is  deeper  than  all  the  schemes  and  all  the  phi- 
losophies, to  the  spiritual  core  of  life,  and  find  in  that 
a  new  principle  of  synthesis  and  unification,  a  new 
base  for  our  thinking,  a  new  key  for  our  music,  and  a 
new  spirit  for  our  art. 

It  may  not  be  possible  to  define  in  an  abstract  way 
the  modes  of  analysis  and  criticism   by   which   the 


28o        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

spiritual  mind  operates;  but  we  may,  I  think,  see 
clearly  enough  what  they  are  when  they  are  at  work. 
Take  Literature,  for  instance.  The  first  question  of 
the  spiritual  mind  concerning  a  given  piece  of  litera- 
ture will  be,  What  is  its  net  tendency?  It  will  lay  on 
one  side  for  the  moment  considerations  of  style, 
artistic  effectiveness,  and  the  other  subordinate  factors 
in  literature.  It  will  regard  a  book  as  having  a  certain 
definite  kind  of  reaction,  and  it  will  judge  the  value 
of  its  style  and  other  accessories  by  their  comparative 
effectiveness  in  helping  or  hindering  this  distinctive 
reaction.  It  will  then  inquire  what  the  reaction  is — 
is  it  true  or  false,  good  or  evil  ?  Is  it  a  stimulus  to  a 
better  mode  of  life,  or  is  it  merely  an  endeavor  to 
gratify  the  baser  cravings  of  the  natural  man?  Does 
it  leave  a  man  just  where  he  was,  only  more  confirmed 
in  his  condition,  or  does  it  convey  to  him  another  ideal 
of  life  and  make  articulate  a  quickening  Word?  It 
does  not  of  necessity  mean  that  a  book  must  have  a 
definitely  didactic  purpose.  It  is  enough  if  the  book 
reflects  and  suggests  some  part  of  the  ultimate  total 
truth  of  life.  It  need  have  no  stated  moral,  but  it 
should  have  a  definite  spiritual  reaction. 

Therefore,  a  spiritual  idealism  will  condemn  all 
kinds  of  descriptive  realism  which  endeavors  to  point 
the  thing  as  it  sees  it  without  reference  to  the  broad 
tendencies  and  the  ultimate  goal  of  life.  There  is  a 
true  realism  which  deals  with  the  things  of  the  gutter 
but  does  not  forget  the  heaven  above.  The  realism 
which  does  not  rise  out  of  the  gutter  is  a  constructive 
lie,  because  it  deliberately  obscures  the  greater  part  of 
the  truth.  The  spiritual  point  of  view  does  not  make 
a  man  prudish  or  squeamish,  but  it  enables  him  to  look 


THE  SPIRITUAL  MIND  AT  WORK      281 

at  the  unsavory  things  of  life  without  dedining  to 
cynicism,  and  though  he  knows  that  the  gutter  is  there, 
he  knows  that  the  gutter  is  not  the  last  word  upon  the 
sum  of  things.  What  it  does  ask  of  literature  is  that 
it  should  have  a  vision :  that  it  should  be  lit  up  by  the 
gleam,  and  that  its  impact  upon  men  should  induce  a 
tendency  in  them  to  go  in  the  same  direction.  It 
demands  that  the  literary  adventure,  whatever  the 
country  it  proposes  to  traverse,  whatsoever  vehicle  it 
proposes  to  use  for  the  journey,  verse  or  prose,  shall 
start  from  a  spiritual  base — shall  start,  that  is,  from 
the  inmost  core  of  life  and  not  from  some  arbitrary 
point  on  its  fringe,  and  that  it  shall  keep  all  the  way 
in  touch  with  the  base.  It  requires  that  all  literature 
shall  be  informed  with  a  single  spirit,  that  it  shall  be 
fully  charged  throughout  with  the  mind  of  Christ, 
and  that  it  shall  steadily  back  on  to  the  spiritual  and 
the  ultimate. 

The  criticism  of  the  spiritual  idealist  will  for  this 
reason  condemn  all  "  art  for  art's  sake."  It  cannot 
ascribe  any  significance  to  Art  save  only  as  art  does 
make  articulate  some  facet  of  eternal  truth,  save  only 
as  it  conveys  to  men  the  challenge  of  the  spiritual. 
The  realistic  trivialities  of  a  Meissonier  it  will  regard 
as  sheer  irrelevancies,  and  it  will  even  demand  that 
art  which  is  simply  decorative  shall  have  a  spiritual 
reaction.  Its  criticism  of  a  new  school  will  not  pri- 
marily be  of  its  idiom,  its  devices,  the  machinery  by 
which  it  will  produce  its  characteristic  effects,  but 
a  criticism  of  the  effect.  This  does  not  mean  that 
all  art  should  be  allegorical  any  more  than  it  means 
that  all  literature  should  be  didactic;  but  it  does  mean 
that  it  should  add  some  true  tints  to  the  sky  of  life. 


282        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

It  turns  away  from  the  twisted  paganism  of  the  Post- 
Impressionists  with  resentment  and  weariness,  and 
finds  itself  more  at  home  in  the  blue  skies  and  the 
idyllic  simplicity  of  a  Corot.  Not,  indeed,  that  it 
turns  its  face  away  from  all  but  blue  skies.  Its  de- 
mand is  not  for  a  certain  kind  of  subject,  but  for  a 
certain  kind  of  spirit  in  the  treatment  of  the  subject, 
even  though  the  subject  be  found  in  the  gutter.  It 
requires  that  art,  like  literature,  shall  have  a  definite 
spiritual  reaction. 

But  this  presupposes  that  both  literature  and  art 
should  have  a  spiritual  origin  and  a  spiritual  driving 
force,  for  men  do  not  gather  figs  from  thistles.  The 
natural  man  cannot  produce,  any  more  than  he  can 
judge,  spiritual  things.  It  is  true  that  all  literature 
and  art  which  are  permanently  vital  had  a  spiritual 
origin;  for  the  mark  of  a  spiritual  origin  and  the 
spiritual  energy  in  literature  and  art  is  a  certain  cre- 
ative quality.  That  free  creative  energy  which  Berg- 
son  discerns  in  nature  is  for  ever  producing  new 
things,  and  the  same  energy  in  art  and  literature  does 
the  same  thing.  It  creates  new  things  out  of  old 
materials,  but  it  adds  something  to  them  which  binds 
them  in  a  new,  living  synthesis.  Shakespeare  could 
take  an  old  story  and  touch  it  with  the  alchemy  of  a 
spiritual  energy  and  re-create  it  into  a  new,  living 
thing.  Indeed,  Shakespeare  may  be  taken  as  the  out- 
standing demonstration  of  this  thesis.  For  though  we 
may  not  ascribe  equal  value  to  his  various  writings,  yet 
in  most  of  them  it  is  possible  to  trace  the  spiritual  im- 
pulse, and  in  the  best  it  expresses  itself  as  a  creative 
energy  of  the  highest  order.  Shakespeare's  insistence 
"  upon  the  divinity  of  forgiveness,  of  perpetual  mercy, 


THE  SPIRITUAL  MIND  AT  WORK      283 

of  constant  patience,  of  everlasting  gentleness,  the 
stainless  purity  of  thought  and  motive,  the  clear- 
sighted perception  of  a  soul  of  goodness  in  things  evil, 
the  unfailing  sense  of  the  equal  providence  of  justice, 
the  royalty  of  v^itness  to  sovereign  truth,"  *  proves 
him  to  have  been  a  man  with  a  true  pervasive  vision, 
whose  pen  moved  at  the  impulse  of  a  deep  spiritual 
apprehension  of  this  scheme  of  things.  The  last 
thing  one  would  say  of  Shakespeare  is  that  he  had  a 
reasoned  philosophy  of  life;  but  "  he  saw  life  steadily 
and  he  saw  it  whole  " — saw  it,  that  is,  from  a  spir- 
itual point  of  view,  and  interpreted  it  with  a  spiritual 
mind.  From  the  day  of  the  Greek  dramatists  to  this, 
the  men  who  stand  out  in  art  and  letters  as  masters 
and  prophets  are  men  in  whom  there  was  a  spiritual 
energy  which  created  living  and  abiding  things.  That 
great  resurgence  of  spiritual  life  which  we  call  the 
Renaissance  was  a  creative  period;  it  was  the  period 
that  produced  Dante,  Petrarch,  and  Langland  in  litera- 
ture; Giotto,  Cimabue,  Fra  Angelico,  Van  Eyck, 
Michelangelo,  Titian,  Raphael,  Correggio,  and  Da 
Vinci  in  art;  and  there  is  not  one  of  these  whose  spir- 
itual energy  does  not  still  remain  and  make  itself 
articulate  in  the  works  which  he  has  bequeathed  to  us. 
The  world  is  waiting  for  another  irruption  of  spiritual 
life  which  will  bring  another  creative  period  into  its 
literary  and  artistic  life,  and  deliver  us  from  the  con- 
fused triviality  of  an  age  without  vision. 

There  are  few  departments  of  our  life  in  which  the 
need  of  the  spiritual  point  of  view  is  so  pressing  as  in 
Education.     It  is  true  that  we  are  making  great  ad- 
vance, and  are  evolving  some  kind  of  educational  ideal. 
*  Stubbs,  "  The  Christ  of  English  Poetry,"  p.  126. 


284        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

For  a  long  time  education  had  little  more  behind  it 
than  the  conviction  that  ignorance  is  a  bad  thing,  and 
that  some  measure  of  knowledge  was  necessary  in 
order  to  give  a  man  a  fair  chance  in  life.  But  little  by- 
little  we  have  come  to  see  that,  if  we  are  going  to  edu- 
cate at  all,  we  should  educate  sufficiently  to  make  a 
man  a  good  citizen.  This  is,  of  course,  no  new  thing 
in  the  world.  Vittorino,  the  famous  schoolmaster  of 
Padua  (a.d.  1420),  and  Alberti,  another  pedagogue 
of  the  same  period,  both  alike  in  the  succession  of  the 
Renaissance,  held  the  view  that  the  aim  of  education 
was  a  much  greater  thing  than  the  communication  of 
knowledge.  "  Not  every  man,"  said  Vittorino,  "  is 
called  to  be  a  lawyer,  a  physician,  a  philosopher,  to 
live  in  the  public  eye,  nor  has  everyone  outstanding 
gifts  of  natural  capacity,  but  all  of  us  are  created  for 
the  life  of  social  duty,  all  are  responsible  for  the  per- 
sonal influence  that  goes  forth  from  us."  No  educa- 
tion was  adequate,  he  held,  which  did  not  start  from 
this  assumption.  We  have  in  theory  reached  that 
point.  Indeed,  we  may  claim  to  have  gone  beyond  it. 
In  the  introduction  to  the  1904  Code  of  the  Board  of 
Education  these  passages  occur : — 

"  And  though  their  opportunities  are  but  brief,  the 
teachers  can  yet  do  much  to  lay  the  foundations  of  con- 
duct. They  can  endeavor,  by  example  and  influence, 
aided  by  the  sense  of  discipline  which  should  pervade 
the  school,  to  implant  in  the  children  habits  of  in- 
dustry, self-control,  and  courageous  perseverance  in 
the  face  of  difficulties;  they  can  teach  them  to  rever- 
ence what  is  noble,  to  be  ready  for  self-sacrifice,  and 
to  strive  their  utmost  after  purity  and  truth;  they  can 
foster  a  strong  respect  for  duty,  and  that  consideration 


THE  SPIRITUAL  MIND  AT  WORK      285 

and  respect  for  others  which  must  be  the  foundation 
of  unselfishness  and  the  true  basis  of  all  good  man- 
ners; while  the  corporate  life  of  the  school,  especially 
in  the  playground,  should  develop  that  instinct  for  fair 
play  and  for  loyalty  to  one  another  which  is  the  germ 
of  a  wider  sense  of  honor  in  later  life. 

"  In  all  these  endeavors  the  school  should  enlist,  as 
far  as  possible,  the  interest  and  co-operation  of  the 
parents  and  the  home  in  a  united  effort  to  enable  the 
children  not  merely  to  reach  their  full  development  as 
individuals,  but  also  to  become  upright  and  useful 
members  of  the  community  in  which  they  live,  and 
worthy  sons  and  daughters  of  the  country  to  which 
they  belong." 

All  this,  of  course,  is  excellent  so  far  as  it  goes,  but 
it  does  not  explicitly  recognize  the  spiritual  ground  of 
all  adequate  moral  conduct,  and  does  not  therefore  pro- 
vide directly  for  the  awakening  and  the  development 
of  the  spiritual  life.  That  is  the  primary  and  funda- 
mental necessity  of  such  education  as  the  1904  Code 
desiderates;  and  in  view  of  the  unique  and  critical 
quality  of  the  adolescent  period  at  the  time  when  the 
spiritual  life  is  most  easily  and  readily  emancipated,  it 
is  a  grave  defect  in  the  existing  educational  policy  that 
no  stress  is  laid  upon  the  opportunity  which  the  teacher 
has  in  that  period  of  achieving  that  without  which  all 
education  is  little  more  than  a  superficial  veneer.  It  is, 
indeed,  true  that  sectarian  bitterness  in  this  country 
prevents  educationists  from  looking  at  this  aspect  of 
the  problem  with  the  frankness  and  thoroughness 
which  it  requires.  As  it  is,  they  have  to  steer  their  way 
very  gingerly  through  the  religious  factiousness  which 
surrounds  the  problem  of  education.     So  long  as  sec- 


286        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

tarian  passion  is  allowed  to  obtrude  itself  upon  educa- 
tion, so  long  must  our  educational  methods  fall  short 
of  achieving  the  one  thing  which  would  give  to  edu- 
cation its  full  value.  The  ecclesiastical  rivalries  which 
compel  the  process  of  education  to  stop  just  as  it 
reaches  its  vital  point  are  suicidal  to  the  rivals  them- 
selves. For  it  is  beyond  question  that  while  dis- 
tinctive denominational  teaching  may  produce  an  af- 
finity to  a  particular  denomination,  it  cannot  and  never 
does  produce  a  vital  relation  between  the  individual 
and  the  Church.  The  only  thing  that  can  kindle  a 
spiritual  life  is  the  communication  of  a  spirit;  and  it  is 
this  very  spirit  that  sectarian  rivalry  chokes  up.  There 
are  hundreds  of  teachers  in  the  country  from  whom  a 
spiritual  impulse  escapes,  despite  the  limitations  which 
are  placed  upon  them;  but  education  cannot  generally 
achieve  the  awakening  of  the  spiritual  life  until  the 
sectaries  learn  that  their  peculiar  brand  of  piety  has 
no  monopoly  of  spiritual  truth,  and  that  spiritual 
power  inheres  only  in  the  spiritual  life,  of  which  credal 
statements  are  at  best  only  partial  and  provisional  in- 
terpretations. Education  should  be  the  function  of 
persons  with  a  vision ;  and  it  should  not  be  required 
of  them  that  they  should  hide  their  vision  under  a 
bushel  because  they  look  at  it  at  a  different  angle  from 
people  who  have  an  ecclesiastical  axe  to  grind. 

But,  quite  apart  from  this,  we  have  not  yet  out- 
grown a  utilitarian  conception  of  education.  Our 
emphasis  upon  technical  education  is  all  to  the  good  so 
long  as  we  keep  it  in  the  proper  place ;  but  we  are  too 
apt  to  look  upon  it  as  a  kind  of  finishing  process  by 
means  of  which  we  turn  out  individuals  capable  of 
earning  their  own  bread  and  butter.     Our  education 


THE  SPIRITUAL  MIND  AT  WORK      287 

throughout  should  reflect  a  conception  of  life  in  which 
the  bread  and  butter  problem  is  strictly  subordinate. 
It  is  certain  that  no  scheme  of  elementary  education 
can  ever  breed  a  race  of  artists  or  litterateurs;  but  it 
can  at  least  suggest  and  communicate  a  view  of  life 
that  shall  find  its  satisfaction  and  realization  in  the 
ready  and  willing  discharge  of  social  responsibilities, 
and  find  its  joy  and  its  gladness  in  contributing  to  the 
joy  and  gladness  of  others.  Nay,  it  can  do  more  than 
that — it  can  communicate  a  life  which  will  freely  and 
spontaneously  express  itself  in  that  public  spirit  and 
selfless  service  which  constitute  the  very  essence  of 
good  citizenship.  If  we  could  only  impose  the  spir- 
itual point  of  view  with  sufficient  strength  upon  the 
average  man,  he  would  rise  up  in  his  wrath  and  sweep 
away  the  blind  sectaries  whose  quarrels  block  the  way, 
and  would  emancipate  education  so  that  it  may  follow 
out  freely  that  spiritual  impulse  which  is  implicit  in  it, 
and  which,  as  the  1904  Code  quite  clearly  shows,  is 
struggling  to  emerge  into  freedom. 


XXIII 
THE  PERFECT  LAW— THE  LAW  OF  LIBERTY 

IT  is  one  of  the  great  tragedies  of  scholarship  that 
Lord  Acton  never  wrote  his  "  History  of  Lib- 
erty," for  this  is  the  one  and  only  adequate  stand- 
point for  an  historical  survey  which  is  more  than  a 
mere  chronicle  of  events,  and  which  aims  at  a  truly 
scientific  interpretation  of  the  facts.  The  craving  for 
liberty  has  made  more  effectual  history  than  any  other 
human  tendency,  and  historical  movements  may  be 
regarded  as  successive  stages  in  the  assertion  of  the 
perfect  law,  the  law  of  liberty. 

But  what  is  liberty  ?  In  our  ordinary  daily  thought 
we  regard  it  as  the  antithesis  of  bondage,  as  the  ab- 
sence of  restriction,  as  something  which  is  contingent 
on  certain  external  conditions.  But  a  moment's  think- 
ing is  sufficient  to  show  that  this  is  not  an  adequate 
definition  of  liberty.  Freed  slaves  have  been  known 
to  elect  to  live  on  under  the  same  conditions  as  they 
lived  under  before  their  liberation;  and  we  know  as  a 
matter  of  fact  that  it  is  an  absolute  impossibility  to 
live  independently  of  all  external  restrictions.  Lib- 
erty is  not  the  absence  of  restrictions ;  it  is  the  power 
to  choose  under  what  restrictions  we  will  live.  Lib- 
erty, that  is,  is  the  power  of  self-determination;  and 
real  bondage  is  the  absence  of  it. 

Since  we  are  organized  in  societies  we  must  accept 
certain  restrictions.     There  are  certain   concessions 

288 


THE  LAW  OF  LIBERTY  289 

which  we  must  make,  certain  limitations  which  we 
must  submit  to.  If  a  man  says,  "  I  shall  not  make  any 
concessions;  I  shall  not  submit  to  any  limitations;  I 
will  live  my  own  life  in  my  own  way,  whatever  hap- 
pens," he  is  not  claiming  liberty,  but  embracing  license. 
License  is  liberty  run  amok — ^the  power  of  self-deter- 
mination asserted  to  the  detriment  of  others;  and  in 
this  case  society  has  to  protect  itself  by  enforcing  the 
necessary  limitations  upon  a  licentious  individual.  So- 
ciety has  embodied  in  its  laws  the  limitations  on  con- 
duct which  are  essential  to  its  life ;  and  it  says  to  the  in- 
dividual, *'  So  long  as  you  accept  and  observe  these 
laws,  you  can,  for  the  rest,  do  as  you  choose.  So  long 
as  you  keep  within  the  area  thus  marked  out,  you  have 
liberty."  These  are,  of  course,  not  the  only  limita- 
tions which  a  self-respecting  person  will  observe;  but 
they  represent  the  minimum  which  a  given  society  re- 
gards as  being  necessary  to  its  well-being.  Most  of  us 
accept  these  laws  as  embodying  the  conditions  upon 
which  we  can  live  happily  together  and  make  the  best 
of  each  other.  Partly  by  inherited  tendency,  partly  by 
early  discipline,  but  mostly  by  our  free  choice,  we  have 
set  our  lives  at  the  angle  of  that  social  justice  which  is 
embodied  in  our  laws.  We  have  voluntarily  accom- 
modated ourselves  to  the  conditions.  We  only  feel  the 
laws  as  restrictions  when  we  depart  from  the  spirit  of 
that  law  which  we  have  accepted  as  our  own  guide,  and 
which  we  have  recognized  as  embodying  the  condi- 
tions of  a  fair  social  existence. 

Liberty  may  therefore  be  defined  provisionally  as 
consisting  in  a  willing  harmony  of  inner  disposition 
with  external  conditions.  This  is  liberty  even  for  a 
man  on  a  desert  island.     For  if  he  does  not  harmonize 


290        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

his  life,  say  in  the  matter  of  food  and  clothing,  with 
the  physical  conditions  of  his  island,  he  will  immedi- 
ately be  sensible  of  certain  restrictions.  He  will  pay 
for  the  lack  of  harmony  with  his  physical  surround- 
ings in  a  lower  physical  vitality,  in  a  diminution  of 
his  power  of  self-determination. 

But  this  is  not  to  have  said  all  that  should  be  said. 
There  are  circumstances  when  the  lack  of  harmony 
with  external  conditions  is  due  to  something  in  the 
character  of  the  conditions ;  and  there  can  be  no  liberty 
until  these  conditions  are  changed — if,  that  is,  they  are 
changeable.  The  man  on  the  desert  island  has  to  sub- 
mit to  physical  conditions  which  cannot  be  changed. 
But  suppose  there  are  also  hostile  wild  animals  on  the 
island.  He  will  either  have  to  domesticate  or  to  exter- 
minate these  if  he  is  to  be  free.  He  will  need  to  change 
the  character  of  the  conditions.  In  the  circumstances 
of  human  life  there  are  very  few  external  conditions 
which  cannot  be  changed,  and  which  are  not,  in  fact, 
always  changing.  The  struggle  for  liberty  has  just 
been  the  struggle  to  modify  external  conditions. 

So  far  as  many  of  these  conditions  are  concerned, 
harmony  with  them  has  involved  no  hardship.  But 
there  have  been  and  still  are  some  conditions  to  which 
certain  primordial  elements  of  human  nature  cannot 
adapt  themselves  without  doing  violence  to  themselves, 
perhaps  even  without  suppressing  themselves  out  of 
existence  altogether.  Indeed,  where  the  insistence 
upon  established  external  conditions  has  been  rigor- 
ously enforced,  these  human  tendencies  have  often 
been  utterly  strangled.  One  of  these  is  a  man's  self- 
respect.  He  may  regard  himself  as  beholden  to  the 
State,  but  he  knows  that  no  individual  or  institution 


THE  LAW  OF  LIBERTY  291 

other  than  the  State  has  any  power  over  him ;  even,  in- 
deed though  the  State  acknowledge  and  endorse  the 
claims  of  such  individuals  or  institutions.  The  strug- 
gle for  civil  liberty  has  been  the  struggle  to  impose 
that  view  on  the  civil  constitution.  It  has  in  turn 
broken  up  slavery  and  feudalism,  autocracy  and  the 
divine  right  of  kings ;  and  it  will  probably  break  up 
some  other  things  before  it  is  done.  Here,  then,  is 
a  case  where  some  inner  element  in  human  nature  has 
compelled,  and  is  compelling,  the  external  conditions 
to  bring  themselves  into  harmony  with  it. 

The  religious  instinct  has  done  the  same  thing.  It 
is  a  feeling  inherent  in  man  that  his  relations  to  God 
and  his  dealings  with  God  are  not  to  be  interfered  with 
by  any  mundane  authority,  whether  it  be  claimed  by 
an  individual  or  an  institution.  He  has  the  power  to 
choose  how  he  will  approach  God — whether  directly  or 
through  a  priest  or  a  church.  Whenever  an  attempt 
has  been  made  to  coerce  a  man  to  approach  God  in  one 
particular  way,  it  has  always  been  resented,  and  it  has 
always  been  in  the  long  run  foiled.  The  Roman 
Church  tried  to  do  so,  and  the  West  threw  it  over- 
board in  consequence ;  and  it  has  never  been  able  to  en- 
force its  claim  on  a  large  scale  except  under  conditions 
of  ignorance  and  mental  lethargy.  The  State  has  also 
tried  to  constrain  the  individual  to  conform  to  a  uni- 
form type  of  religious  observance ;  but  the  State  was 
taught  to  know  better.  The  religion  of  men  as  indi- 
viduals and  communities  is  a  thing  which  the  State  has 
learnt  (though  even  yet  not  quite  fully)  to  keep  its 
hands  off.  A  great  deal  of  the  suspicion  with  which 
the  Roman  Church  is  regarded  in  England  arises  from 
the  conviction  that  it  still  would  not  be  unwilling  to 


292        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

use  the  power  of  the  State  to  constrain  men  to  conform 
to  it;  and  so  long  as  this  suspicion  remains,  so  long 
must  Romanism  stand  outside  the  main  current  of  na- 
tional life. 

Here,  again,  we  have  an  instance  of  a  human  instinct 
constraining  external  conditions  into  harmony  with  it- 
self; and  while  we  still  define  liberty  as  a  willing  har- 
mony of  inner  disposition  and  outer  conditions,  it  is 
with  the  addition  that  this  harmony  is  achieved  in  two 
ways — first  by  adapting  the  inner  disposition  to  the 
outer  conditions,  secondly  by  changing  the  outer  condi- 
tions into  harmony  with  inner  disposition.  And  history 
is  essentially  the  history  of  liberty  because  it  is  the  his- 
tory of  the  working  out  of  these  two  parallel  processes. 

But  social  liberty,  religious  liberty,  civil  liberty  are 
the  achievements  of  an  inner  spirit  which  demands  a 
still  larger  liberty  than  any  or  all  of  them.  There  is 
such  a  thing  as  spiritual  liberty;  and  spiritual  liberty 
must  conform  to  our  general  definition  of  liberty. 
That  does  not  mean  that  we  can  give  a  general  account 
of  it,  save  only  that  it  is  to  our  entire  life  what  reli- 
gious liberty  is  to  our  religious  instincts  and  civil  lib- 
erty is  to  our  self-respect ;  it  is  a  condition  wherein  our 
whole  being  is  emancipated  and  made  free  to  develop 
and  move  along  its  own  lines.  But  as  we  are  as  yet 
unacquainted  with  our  whole  being,  as  there  may  be 
undiscovered  powers  and  faculties  latent  in  us  that 
have  not  yet  come  into  the  daylight,  we  can  do  no  more 
than  speculate  about  this  liberty  as  a  whole.  But  there 
are  two  aspects  of  our  life  in  which  we  may  trace 
with  tolerable  certainty  what  a  spiritual  liberty  will  do 
for  us — namely,  in  thought  and  in  conduct. 

We  shall  best  appreciate  the  nature  of  the  emanci- 


THE  LAW  OF  LIBERTY  293 

pation  which  the  emergence  of  the  spiritual  Hfe  brings 
with  it — for  this  is  what  I  mean  by  spiritual  liberty — 
by  considering  it  in  a  specific  case.  The  case  that  will 
immediately  spring  to  one's  mind  is  that  of  the  Apostle 
Paul,  in  whom  the  emancipation  of  thought  and  con- 
duct was  perhaps  the  outstanding  quality  of  his  new 
experience.  The  idea  of  liberty  pervades  his  thought, 
and  the  word  and  its  cognates  are  for  ever  on  his  lips. 
This  liberty  had  reference  to  a  twofold  previous  ex- 
perience, the  intellectual  bondage  of  Judaism  and  the 
moral  bondage  of  Pharisaic  legalism.  From  this  double 
bondage  he  was  emancipated  by  one  and  the  same  act. 

I.  What  I  have  called  intellectual  bondage  was 
what  Paul  called  a  bondage  to  "  the  letter  " ;  which  is  a 
bondage  to  traditional  statements  of  truth  and  modes 
of  thought.  The  Jew  had  his  own  peculiar  set  of  cate- 
gories, and  that  which  could  not  be  fitted  into  any  of 
these  had  of  necessity  to  be  extruded.  This,  of  course, 
is  not  peculiar  to  the  Jews.  It  is  a  commonplace  of 
every  man's  experience  that  traditional  ideas  do  suc- 
ceed in  binding  the  mind  so  that  when  a  new  idea  comes 
along  the  first  impulse  is  to  send  it  about  its  business. 
When  Darwin  announced  the  evolution  theory,  it  was 
shown  to  the  door  summarily,  and  not  always  politely, 
by  traditionalists  of  all  kinds.  But  there  are  some 
ideas  that  will  not  be  turned  away.  They  insist  upon 
coming  in,  and  we  are  compelled  at  last  to  modify  the 
old  arrangement  of  ideas  in  our  minds  so  as  to  pro- 
vide the  necessary  accommodation  for  the  intruder. 

Let  it  be  said  that  up  to  a  certain  point  this  tardi- 
ness to  welcome  new  ideas  is  a  wholesome  and  useful 
instinct.    It  is  possible  to  be  over-ready  and  over-facile 


294        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

in  our  reception  of  new  ideas ;  and  there  are  men  whose 
minds  are  in  a  state  of  perpetual  flux.  It  is  a  good 
thing  to  challenge  a  new  idea,  even  to  keep  it  at  arm's 
length  until  some  presumption  of  its  truth  is  apparent. 
We  challenge  every  piece  of  food  that  we  put  into  our 
mouths;  it  has  to  run  the  gauntlet  of  smell  and  sight 
before  it  is  admitted;  and  it  is  not  well  to  admit  new 
ideas  without  equally  vigorous  scrutiny.  Otherwise, 
one  may  find  that  the  whole  trouble  and  discomfort 
involved  in  shifting  the  existing  furniture  of  the  mind 
to  make  room  for  the  new-comer  has  been  spent  in 
vain,  because  the  credentials  of  the  new-comer  turned 
out  to  be  bogus.  A  certain  hesitancy  in  the  reception 
of  the  new  makes  for  mental  stability. 

At  the  same  time  one  should  preserve  sufficient 
mobility  in  one's  mind  to  make  room  for  new  ideas 
when  that  becomes  inevitable.  The  tendency  is  to 
close  our  system  prematurely,  so  that  we  become  im- 
penetrable to  new  truth.  This  is  what  William  James 
calls,  in  a  passage  already  quoted,  "  old-fogyism,"  and 
we  encounter  it  on  all  hands.  But  when  old-fogyism 
develops  in  the  region  of  religious  thought,  it  is  re- 
inforced by  fear.  A  man  who  has  inherited  certain 
doctrinal  traditions,  and  thinks  that  these  traditions 
embody  the  final  wisdom,  is  naturally  scared  when  a 
new  idea  comes  along  and  challenges  them.  One  of  the 
great  obstacles  to  the  development  of  religious  thought 
is  the  great  multitude  of  people  who  think  that 

God's  world  will  fall  apart 
Because  we  tear  a  parchment  more  or  less, 

and  who,  when  they  think  the  parchment  is  in  danger, 
fall  straightway  into  a  panic. 


THE  LAW  OF  LIBERTY  295 

It  would  be  ungracious  and  ungenerous  to  fit  this 
cap  on  any  existing  schools  of  religious  teachers.  For 
our  purpose,  it  is  enough  to  remember  that  this  was 
the  kind  of  tradition  and  view  in  which  Paul  had  been 
brought  up.  He  was  not  the  only  one  at  that  time 
who  accepted  this  position.  There  were  even  among 
the  early  Christians  those  who  held  that  Christianity 
was  a  development  within  the  circle  of  Judaism,  and 
that  a  man  had  to  pass  through  the  gateway  of  the 
Law  into  the  discipleship  of  Christ.  We  know  how 
this  view  failed  to  impose  itself  upon  the  early  Church; 
and  it  was  in  a  large  measure  due  to  Paul's  clear- 
sighted understanding  of  the  truth  of  the  situation 
that  this  failure  was  due.  How  Paul  arrived  at  his 
apprehension  of  the  meaning  of  the  Gospel  and  its  lib- 
erty would  require  a  psychological  analysis  which  is 
beyond  our  powers.  All  that  is  certain  is  that  it  was 
precipitated  by  the  direct  impact  of  Christ  upon  his 
soul.  He  had  been  chafing  in  the  bondage  of  Judaism, 
and  this  impact  set  him  free.  Jesus  Christ  would  not 
stand  outside  Paul's  scheme  of  things.  The  new  truth 
forced  itself  in  and  Paul  had  to  cast  out  the  old  tradi- 
tional arrangement  which  could  find  no  room  for  Him. 
He  was  compelled  to  look  on  Jesus  "  with  open  face," 
and  the  issue  was  that  Jesus  remained  and  the  old 
traditional  scheme  was  thrown  on  the  scrap-heap. 

But  it  was  not  merely  with  reference  to  Jesus  that 
Paul  found  himself  free.  The  new  truth  had  so  broken 
up  the  previous  synthesis  of  ideas  that  Paul  found 
himself  in  a  new  universe.  He  no  longer  went  about 
the  world  with  the  thought  that  the  wisdom  of  the  Jew 
contained  all  the  truth  of  God;  and  the  way  in  which 
he  regarded  Greek  thought  and  the  religious  ideas  of 


296        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

the  field  of  his  apostolate  shows  that  he  was  prepared 
to  recognize  truth  wherever  he  found  it.  The  large, 
liberal  temper,  especially  of  the  later  epistles,  marks 
the  complete  emancipation  of  the  apostle's  mind  from 
the  rigid  and  inelastic  bonds  of  his  early  Pharisaism. 
In  nothing  does  the  revolution  which  his  conversion  ef- 
fected show  itself  more  manifestly  than  in  his  attitude 
to  the  Greek  world.  Not  only  does  he  confess  his  own 
indebtedness  to  the  Greeks,  but  during  his  apostolate  he 
was  careful  that  the  churches  should  not  lose  "  any- 
thing of  the  excellencies  of  the  Greek  spirit.  His  ex- 
treme fondness  for  the  word  ;i^ apz?  can  hardly  be  quite 
separated  in  the  minds  of  his  numerous  Hellenic  hear- 
ers from  the  Greek  x^Pi^>  the  grace  and  the  charm 
which  is  of  the  essence  of  Hellenism."  *  "  He  never 
adopted  that  antagonism  to  philosophy  which  became 
customary  in  the  second  century.  On  the  contrary,  he 
says,  '  Regulate  with  wisdom  your  conduct  towards 
the  outside  world,  making  your  market  to  the  full 
of  the  opportunity  of  this  life.  Let  your  conversa- 
tion be  seasoned  with  the  salt  and  refinement  of  del- 
icacy so  as  to  know  the  suitable  reply  to  make  to 
every  individual.'  .  .  .  He  advises  his  pupils  to  learn 
from  the  surrounding  world  everything  that  was 
worthy  of  it  .  .  .  but  it  is  in  Phil.  iv.  8  that  this  spirit 
is  expressed  in  its  fullest  and  most  exquisite  and 
graceful  form :  *  Whatsoever  is  true,  whatsoever  is 
courteous,  whatsoever  is  of  fine  expression,  all  ex- 
cellence, all  merit,  take  account  of  these.'  t     Where- 

*  Ramsay  in  Hastings'  Die,  Bible,  Ext.  151.  Notice  also  in  this 
connection  the  Hellenic  emphasis  upon  liberty,  especially  in  Ga- 
latians.     See  Ramsay,  "  Cities  of  St,  Paul,"  p.  36. 

f  Ramsay,  "St,  Paul  the  Traveller,"  pp,  148,  149. 


THE  LAW  OF  LIBERTY  297 

ever  you  find  these  qualities,  notice  them,  consider 
them,  imitate  them." 

This  is  true  intellectual  liberty;  and  it  is  a  curious 
paradox  that,  with  Paul's  example  before  their  eyes, 
Christian  folk  should  fall  so  readily  into  the  bondage 
of  creeds  and  confessions.  For  a  hardened,  inelastic 
Christian  tradition  is  no  better  than  a  Jewish  one ;  and 
the  man  who  approaches  the  Scriptures  and  Jesus 
Christ  with  a  set  of  antecedent  dogmatic  assumptions 
will  inevitably  miss  the  significance  both  of  the  Scrip- 
tures and  of  Jesus  Himself,  because  he  will  inevitably 
try  to  fit  both  alike  into  his  existing  scheme.  It  is, 
no  doubt,  necessary  to  formulate  creeds;  but  it  is  an 
entire  fallacy  to  treat  them  as  final  and  authoritative 
statements  of  Christian  truth.  They  are  not  termini  ad 
quern  but  termini  a  quo.  They  register  the  advance  of 
Christian  truth ;  they  are  the  finger-posts  by  which  we 
trace  the  growth  of  certain  types  and  tendencies  of 
Christian  doctrine;  and  the  Nicene  Creed  and  the 
Westminster  Confession  are  no  more  to  be  taken  as 
definitive  statements  of  Christian  truth  than  an  eight- 
eenth century  map  of  Africa  is  to  be  taken  as  a  final 
account  of  the  interior  of  that  continent.  This  does 
not  mean  that  we  are  to  throw  the  creeds  overboard, 
but  simply  that  we  have  to  keep  them  in  their  proper 
place  and  to  remember  their  limitations. 

The  spiritual  life  enables  us  to  do  this,  for  it  knows 
that  the  spirit  which  lies  beneath  the  creed  is  a  greater 
thing  than,  and  has  never  been  captured  into,  the  letter 
of  it.  It  accepts  the  creeds  as  genuine  endeavors  to 
compass  and  define  the  truth  in  the  light  of  the  ages 
which  produced  them ;  but  it  does  not  regard  them  as 
authoritative  for  itself.     It  claims  and  knows  it  has 


298        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

the  right  to  look  at  Truth  in  the  face ;  and  the  spiritual 
man  is  not  afraid  to  believe  that  in  a  world  of  growing 
light  he  will  be  able  to  see  the  Truth  better  than  his 
fathers  did.  He  claims  and  knows  that  he  has  the 
right  to  look  upon  the  Scriptures  and  the  creeds,  even 
upon  Christ,  with  his  own  eyes,  and  that  he  is  not  com- 
pelled to  use  the  eyes  of  his  ancestors  for  the  purpose. 
This,  however,  does  not  mean  that  such  liberty  is 
to  be  arbitrarily  exercised,  for  then  it  becomes  intel- 
lectual license.  The  spiritual  life  does  impose  a  definite 
point  of  view,  does  provide  a  base  for  the  intellect; 
indeed,  it  is  that  base  itself.  Put  in  another  way,  the 
spiritual  life  introduces  the  individual  into  a  new  uni- 
verse of  thought,  which  is  the  spiritual  universe  itself. 
True  intellectual  liberty  is  that  which  comes  from  the 
harmony  of  the  inner  spiritual  life  with  the  spiritual 
universe  without,  from  the  mind  of  Christ  operating  in 
the  universe  of  Christ;  and  that  is  a  universe  spacious 
and  enlarged  enough  to  give  plenty  of  room  for  all  the 
independent  and  creative  thought  of  which  the  mind 
of  man  is  capable.  "  Where  the  Spirit  of  the  Lord  is, 
there  is  liberty."  The  emergence  of  the  spiritual  life 
is  the  true  enfranchisement  of  thought,  is  the  gift  to 
the  mind  of  the  freedom  of  the  City  of  God. 

2.  But  Paul's  emancipation  from  the  bondage  of 
the  letter  in  thought  was  concurrent  with  his  liberation 
from  an  analogous  bondage  in  conduct.  Paul,  like 
every  other  Jew,  was  brought  up  to  believe  that  the  end 
of  life  lay  in  the  punctilious  observance  of  a  code  of 
laws,  or  rather  in  the  achievement  of  a  righteousness 
which  was  defined  by  the  code.  It  is  probable  that  most 
Jews  found  this  mode  of  life  more  or  less  against  the 


THE  LAW  OF  LIBERTY  299 

grain,  for  it  entailed  the  abandonment  of  every  manner 
of  interest  or  inclination  which  impeded  the  fulfilment 
of  the  routine  of  the  law.  A  man  might  by  continu- 
ous rigorous  self-discipline  shut  everything  else  out  of 
his  life  and  limit  himself  to  this  endeavor,  from  an 
unquestioning  sense  of  its  rightness.  But  it  is  difficult 
to  believe  that  a  man  who  paused  to  think  about  the 
matter  would  not  see  that  this  robbed  life  of  spon- 
taneity, of  initiative,  of  independence,  of  all  that  makes 
up  the  experience  of  real  life.  Every  man  knows  some- 
thing of  the  bondage  of  routine,  knows  how  irksome  it 
speedily  becomes;  and  he  comes  sooner  or  later  to  feel 
that  he  really  lives  only  when  he  breaks  away  from 
it.  Paul,  no  doubt,  felt  this;  he  was  not  finding  his 
true  life,  nor  finding  anything  that  a  successful  per- 
formance of  the  whole  range  of  legal  obligations 
should  ex  hypothesi  have  brought  with  it;  the  external 
conditions  were  not  spacious  enough  for  his  spiritual 
vitality.  The  impact  of  Christ  upon  him  enabled  him 
to  break  through  the  hedge  of  the  law  and  set  his 
spirit  free  to  work  out  its  own  characteristic  morality 
in  the  open  world. 

We  shall,  I  think,  best  appreciate  the  situation  in 
which  Paul  found  himself  by  considering  the  difference 
between  the  two  ideals  of  life  which  were  current  in 
the  world  at  that  time.  The  Jewish  ideal,  which  was 
his  own,  regarded  the  end  of  life  as  consisting  in — or 
at  least  as  being  reached  through — successful  moral  en- 
deavor. The  Greek  ideal,  on  the  other  hand,  speak- 
ing broadly,  regarded  the  end  of  life  as  being  realized 
in  full  and  spontaneous  self-expression.  In  neither  case 
was  life  conceived  of  as  consisting  merely  in  being, 
whether  in  a  contemplative  passivity  or  in  mere  ex- 


300        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

perience.  In  both  cases,  the  end  of  Hfe  was  found  in 
action.  But  in  the  one  case  the  action  consisted  in  the 
concentrated  endeavor  of  the  will  to  reach  a  particular 
mark  outside  itself;  and  in  the  other,  in  working  out 
freely  and  spontaneously  what  was  already  within.  In 
the  one  case  the  goal  was  everything;  in  the  other  the 
base  was  everything.  In  the  one,  the  action  demanded 
a  concentration  of  life  upon  one  point;  in  the  other,  it 
meant  the  broadening  out  of  life  from  a  point.  The 
Jew  narrowed  life  down  to  a  single  aim.  The  Greek 
believed  in  a  full  and  unfettered  expression  of  every 
part  of  life.  The  one  wanted  holiness  of  life;  the 
other,  fulness  of  life. 

One  may  trace  the  consequences  of  these  divergent 
views  in  the  kind  of  heritage  which  the  world  has 
received  from  the  Jew  and  the  Greek  respectively. 
From  the  Jew  it  has  inherited  a  body  of  literature 
which  is  charged  with  one  aim  and  makes  through- 
out for  the  same  goal — the  great  classical  literature 
of  righteousness.  From  the  Greek  it  has  received  a 
wide  and  diversified  literature  of  poetry,  rhetoric,  and 
drama;  a  rich  inheritance  of  speculative  and  ethical 
thought,  of  sculpture  and  architecture;  and  the  Greek 
achievements  in  almost  all  these  departments  have 
never  been  surpassed. 

This,  however,  does  not  imply  that  the  Greek  had 
an  unqualified  superiority  over  the  Jew.  For,  side  by 
side  with  the  great  literary  and  artistic  achievements 
of  Greece,  there  often  went  an  unspeakable  foulness  of 
moral  corruption.  The  New  Testament  descriptions 
of  the  life  of  the  pagan  world  of  the  day  tell  us  some- 
thing of  this.  When  the  Greek  thought  of  fulness  of 
life,  of  complete  self-expression  (I  do  not  mean,  of 


THE  LAW  OF  LIBERTY  301 

course,  that  he  thought  of  it  in  these  terms,  but  that  he 
thought  of  the  thing),  he  did  not  discriminate;  and 
carnal  self-indulgence  was  frequently  as  much  a  part 
of  his  practical  philosophy  as  was  the  literary  and 
artistic  self-expression  which  produced  Greek  classical 
literature  and  art.  The  Jew  stood  at  the  other  ex- 
treme and  tended  to  repress  everything  save  only  the 
one  thing,  and  to  turn  all  his  vital  energy  into  the  one 
channel.  Fie  constrained  himself  by  a  rigorous  self- 
discipline  to  the  exclusive  pursuit  of  righteousness. 
The  Greek  was  not  ignorant  in  his  best  moments  of  the 
need  of  self-discipline;  but  in  practice  it  never  became 
more  than  a  partial  and  loosely  attached  accessory  to 
his  general  theory  of  life.  And  Greece  paid  the  pen- 
alty in  the  evaporation  of  her  genius  in  literature  and 
art  and  in  the  passing  away  of  her  golden  age. 

It  should  be  added  that  the  "  Wisdom  "  teaching  of 
the  Jews  promised  to  add  breadth  to  the  Hebrew  view 
of  life;  but  it  hardly  became  more  than  a  bypath  of 
Jewish  religious  thought.  Through  a  farther  and 
more  thoroughgoing  development  of  the  Wisdom  idea, 
the  Jew  might  have  reached  a  greater  breadth  of 
culture  than  he  actually  did. 

The  Jew  was  right  when  he  made  righteousness  an 
essential  and  indispensable  quality  of  the  true  ideal. 
No  less  was  the  Greek  right  in  his  emphasis  upon  ful- 
ness of  life.  The  complete  view  of  life  is  the  one  that 
effects  a  synthesis  of  both  ideals ;  and  such  a  synthesis 
is  found  in  the  Christian  ideal. 

For  the  Christian  ideal  starts  from  its  characteristic' 
doctrine  of  the  spiritual  life.    What  the  Greek  ideal 
did  not  do,  the  Christian  does.    It  discriminates.     It 
does  not  regard  life  as  one  undifferentiated  whole.    It 


302        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

ascribes  different  values  to  different  planes  of  life,  and 
regards  everything  as  subordinate  and  tributary  to 
the  real  ultimate  life,  which  is  the  spiritual  life.  Of 
course,,  in  theory,  the  Greek  also  differentiated;  for 
Plato,  Aristotle,  and  Xenophon  recognized  an  inner 
division  and  an  antagonism  of  principle  in  the  soul ;  but 
it  is  questionable  whether  they  carried  their  analysis 
far  enough.  Certainly  in  practice  the  Greek  ascribed 
the  same  rights  to  the  natural  and  the  spiritual  life 
because  he  did  not  distinguish  between  them.  But 
this  is  precisely  what  Christianity  does.  It  says  that 
the  "  natural  "  life  is  a  thing  to  be  repressed  rather 
than  expressed,  that  it  must  decrease  and  be  hedged 
around  on  every  side — and  this  as  the  very  condition 
of  the  emancipation  and  the  development  of  the  true, 
the  spiritual  life;  but  that  the  spiritual  should  be 
permitted  free,  unhampered  expression.  The  self- 
discipline  which  the  Jew  imposed  upon  his  whole 
life  so  as  to  concentrate  it  all  into  the  one  channel 
of  righteousness  is  properly  imposed  on  the  natural 
man;  but  when  it  is  imposed  upon  the  whole  life  it 
equally  suppresses  and  at  last  extinguishes  the  spiritual 
man.  The  full  self-expression  which  the  Greek  per- 
mitted to  the  whole  life  is  properly  permitted  only 
to  the  spiritual  man ;  and  when  it  was  permitted  to 
the  natural  man  it  equally  there  also  extinguished 
the  spiritual  man  and  that  spiritual  impulse  which 
had  expressed  itself  in  the  immortality  of  classical 
literature  and  art.  The  Jew  erred  by  making  a  re- 
ligion of  self-discipline.  The  Greek  erred  by  mak- 
ing nothing  of  self -discipline.  The  Christian  ideal 
imposes  self-discipline  where  self-discipline  is  neces- 
sary; it  permits  full  and  free  self-expression  where 


THE  LAW  OF  LIBERTY  303 

that  is  proper;  and  It  marks  off  the  two  fields  by- 
its  principle  that  the  true  ultimate  life  of  man  is  that 
spiritual  life  which  is  the  negation  of  the  natural. 

It  follows  that  the  natural  man  is  under  law,  and 
must  for  ever  be  under  law,  as  the  necessary  condi- 
tion of  the  emancipation  and  development  of  the  spir- 
itual life.  The  need  of  self-discipline  is  never  out- 
grown; but  when  the  spiritual  life  does  get  a  real 
chance  it  exercises  a  discipline  upon  the  flesh  spon- 
taneously and  instinctively.  Indeed,  the  exercise  of 
self-discipline  is  a  mark  of  the  real  presence  of  a  spir- 
itual life  from  the  start.  It  is  one  of  its  weapons  of 
self-defence;  it  holds  the  animal  life  at  bay,  and  com- 
pels it  to  keep  its  distance.  The  "  old  man  "  must  be 
steadily  kept  under  the  law.  To  give  him  any  length 
of  rope  is  to  put  the  spiritual  life  in  jeopardy.  To 
relax  our  self-discipline  is  to  run  the  risk  of  finding 
ourselves  cast  away.  The  day  will  come  when  the 
natural  man  will  cease  to  trouble  us;  but  until  then 
we  can  never  afford  to  be  off  our  guard  or  to  be  remiss 
in  buffeting  him  and  keeping  him  in  subjection. 

The  corollary  of  this  is  that  the  spiritual  life  must  be 
permitted  free  and  unfettered  expression.  It  will 
work  itself  out  in  many  ways — in  new  conceptions  and 
modes  of  daily  business,  in  great  vital  literature,  in 
pictures  and  sculptures  that  will  enrich  life.  In  every 
man  it  will  work  out  in  a  certain  kind  of  conduct,  in  a 
certain  quality  of  relationship  to  our  fellow-men. 
That  is  what  Paul  means  when  he  speaks  of  moral 
goodness  as  the  "  fruit  of  the  Spirit."  It  is  the  spon- 
taneous self-expression  of  the  spiritual  life. 

The  spiritual  life  creates  its  own  morality.  It  is  a 
law  to  itself;  it  has  the  whole  law  within  itself;  and 


304        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

this  kind  of  morality  is  free.  Morality  for  the  spir- 
itual man  consists  not  in  doing  this  or  not  doing  that, 
but  in  being  and  living  out  his  own  true  self.  This  it 
is  that  gives  soundness  to  Polonius'  advice  to 
Laertes : — 

To  thine  own  self  be  true, 

And  it  must  follow,  as  the  nig-ht  the  day, 

Thou  canst  not  then  be  false  to  any  man. 

It  is  certain,  of  course,  that  the  strength  of  the  flesh 
and  the  weakness  of  the  spirit  will  prevent  a  man  from 
rising  to  this  plane  in  a  day.  He  does  not  learn  to 
stand  on  his  own  feet  immediately  his  eyes  are  opened. 
He  must  have  a  guide-post  to  walk  by,  and  that  is 
given.  For  he  has  before  his  eyes  the  perfect  ex- 
pression of  the  spiritual  life  in  the  life  of  Jesus;  he 
can  bring  his  hesitancies  and  doubts  and  failures  into 
that  light,  and  by  so  doing  will  learn  to  see  things 
more  clearly  and  to  tread  more  surely.  For  the  Spirit 
in  us  is  the  Spirit  Who  dwelt  fully  and  perfectly  in 
Jesus,  and  Who  will  invest  our  lives  more  fully  and 
perfectly  as  the  days  go  by. 

The  spiritual  life  is  creative  in  its  moral  self- 
expression  as  it  is  elsewhere.  It  does  not  conform  to 
a  given  type,  though  it  moves  within  a  distinctive  uni- 
verse. We  know  in  our  domestic  lives  something  of 
the  wonderful  ingenuity  and  resourcefulness  of  love, 
how  it  transcends  routine  and  is  for  ever  revealing 
new  powers,  creating  new  situations,  and  laying  itself 
out  to  improve  upon  itself.  The  moral  life  of  the 
spiritual  man  has  no  terminus ;  there  is  no  known  point 
at  which  he  can  say,  "  I  have  attained."  It  is  never 
finished,  never  complete.     It  is  constantly  cutting  out 


THE  LAW  OF  LIBERTY  305 

new  paths,  devising  and  inventing  new  modes  of  ac- 
tion. We  sometimes  say  of  a  man  that  he  has  a 
genius  for  friendship;  he  is  a  friend  as  no  other 
friends  are — warm,  faithful,  constant  as  many  other 
friends  are,  but  with  something  more — for  ever  spring- 
ing on  us  some  surprise  of  affection,  for  ever  aston- 
ishing us  by  the  versatihty  and  the  ingenuity  of  his 
love.  There  is,  speaking  strictly,  no  such  thing  as  per- 
fect friendship;  for  perfection  implies  some  kind  of 
limitation.  The  true  friendship  is  one  that  is  for 
ever  trying  to  go  one  better  on  itself.  That  is  also  the 
true  morality.  It  is  never  perfect,  never  finished ;  for 
it  has  within  it  that  restless,  creative  impulse  which  is 
constantly  constraining  it  to  step  out  beyond  itself,  to 
devise  and  invent  new  heights  to  climb — never  satis- 
fied, never  filled — yet  always  at  peace,  because  it  knows 
itself  to  be  in  the  true  line  of  life  and  in  perfect  tune 
with  the  universe,  which  is  the  mind  and  heart  of 
God. 


XXIV 
THE  SPIRITUAL  LIFE  AT  WORK 

WE  are  making  no  arbitrary  jump  when  we 
identify  the  spiritual  life  as  we  have  con- 
ceived it  in  these  pages  with  what  Jesus 
called  "  the  kingdom  of  heaven."  That  expression 
stood  for  two  things — first,  an  inner  manner  of  life  in 
the  individual;  second,  a  divine  society.  It  is,  of 
course,  impossible  to  dissociate  these  two  ideas.  For 
since  men  do  naturally  and  instinctively  fall  into 
groups  and  societies,  the  possession  of  a  distinctive 
way  of  life  in  the  individuals  of  a  group  will  work  out 
in  a  distinctive  social  life.  The  kingdom  of  heaven  is 
primarily  within  us,  but  when  it  becomes  established 
in  two  or  more  of  us  it  assumes  a  social  form,  and 
becomes  the  nucleus  of  the  divine  commonwealth.  The 
inner  life  which  the  idea  of  the  kingdom  of  heaven 
represents  is  essentially  the  spiritual  life,  and  Jesus 
regards  it  as  the  real  predestined  life  of  man. 

I.  In  one  of  His  parables  Jesus  compares  the  prop- 
agation of  the  kingdom  to  the  action  of  leaven.  It 
is  not  necessary  to  suppose  that  our  Lord  gave  a 
thought  to  the  inwardness  of  the  process  of  fermenta- 
tion which  the  leaven  sets  afoot;  but  it  is  interesting  to 
notice  that  all  that  modern  science  has  to  say  upon  the 
biological  and  chemical  aspects  of  the  process  gives 

306 


THE  SPIRITUAL  LIFE  AT  WORK      307 

additional  point  to  our  Lord's  illustration.  What  Je- 
sus was  thinking  about  was  merely  that  the  leaven 
must  be  put  into  the  meal  and  then,  given  certain  sim- 
ple well-understood  conditions,  the  leaven  would  do  its 
work  and  gradually  assimilate  the  moist  mass  of  meal 
to  itself.  Which,  being  interpreted  in  one  word,  is 
that  the  spiritual  life  is  propagated  by  contagion. 

This,  however,  is  an  explanation  which  raises  a 
number  of  questions.  So  far  as  it  goes  it  is  valid,  and 
for  all  practical  purposes  it  is  adequate.  But  beneath 
it  lies  perhaps  the  most  obstinate  and  least  explored  of 
the  problems  of  human  life — the  nature  of  the  proc- 
esses by  which  men  influence  one  another.  It  is  well 
known  how  husband  and  wife  or  two  friends  will  af- 
fect each  other  sometimes  even  to  the  point  of  de- 
veloping likeness  of  countenance  and  physical  charac- 
teristics; nor  is  this  done  by  interchange  of  speech  or 
thought.  No  man  who  has  been  in  love  or  has  had  a 
friend  will  fail  to  realize  that  there  are  means  of  inter- 
change and  communion  which  are  wholly  independent 
of  sense-communications.  The  interaction  of  two  or 
more  personalities  takes  place  in  large  measure  at  a 
depth  to  which  our  powers  of  analysis  cannot  pene- 
trate. Even  if  we  could  represent  the  total  effect  of 
two  personalities  by  two  separate  mathematical  sym- 
bols, we  could  not  then  formulate  the  equation  of  the 
total  effect  of  two  personalities  in  conflict  or  in  co- 
operation. There  remains  still  an  unknown  elusive 
quantity  which  has  to  be  reckoned  with.  It  is  this  that 
makes  the  psychology  of  the  crowd  so  interesting  a 
study.  Though  one  knew  every  person  in  a  crowd  and 
could  form  a  shrewd  guess  of  what  each  would  do  sep- 
arately under  given  circumstances,  one  could  form  no 


3o8        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

likely  conjecture  of  what,  under  the  same  circum- 
stances, they  would  do  together,  of  what  they  would 
do  as  a  crowd.  We  know  some  of  the  channels  by 
which  personal  influence  is  transmitted;  but  it  is  not 
improbable  that  most  of  them  are  hidden  from  us. 
We  are,  indeed,  as  yet  only  beginning  to  discover  our- 
selves; and  the  self  which  a  man  knows  is  in  all  like- 
lihood no  more  than  a  fraction  of  his  total  self. 

The  fact  remains,  however,  that  we  do  affect  one 
another — that  there  are  means  of  communication  be- 
tween soul  and  soul.  The  contact  is  real  and  effective 
though  it  baffles  explanation;  and  it  is  the  existence  of 
this  contact  that  makes  the  transmission  of  the  spir- 
itual life  a  possibility. 

But  so  far  as  the  spiritual  life  is  concerned,  this 
contact  is  no  automatic  thing,  independent  of  inten- 
tion. The  leaven  must  be  put  in  the  meal.  No  man 
ever  kindled  a  spiritual  life  in  another  unless  a  real 
contact  had  been  established  by  the  will  of  one  or  other 
or  both.  It  may  be  said  that  no  man  ever  started  a 
spiritual  life  in  another  who  did  not  set  himself  delib- 
erately to  do  it.  This  does  not  necessarily  mean  that  he 
fixed  upon  a  given  individual  and  turned  his  battery  of 
spirituality  upon  him;  but  it  does  mean  that  he  has 
deliberately  set  himself  to  the  business  of  producing  a 
spiritual  reaction,  so  that  when  he  has  come  into  con- 
tact— even  unconscious  contact — with  another  in- 
dividual, his  spiritual  energy  has  told  upon  him.  It  is, 
however,  certain  that  a  man  must  come^ — or  at  least 
must  suffer  himself  to  be  brought — within  the  range  of 
a  direct  spiritual  influence,  that  is,  he  must  consent  to 
the  contact,  if  the  spiritual  life  is  to  be  awakened  in 
him.     The  contact  is  the  essential  thing,  however  it  is 


THE  SPIRITUAL  LIFE  AT  WORK      309 

secured;  and  it  is  secured  when  this  man  feels  a  real 
craving  for  the  spiritual  life,  and  that  man  is  pos- 
sessed with  a  passion  to  communicate  it. 

It  has  been  part  of  the  purpose  of  the  foregoing 
chapters  to  indicate  the  probability  that  the  time  is 
not  far  off  when  men  will  again  on  a  large  scale  feel 
the  desire  for  the  spiritual  life,  when  there  will  be  "  a 
famine  for  the  hearing  of  the  Word  of  the  Lord  " — a 
time  when  men  will  be  sick  and  weary  of  living  for 
bread  and  by  bread  alone,  and  will  be  hungry  for  the 
Word  that  comes  forth  from  the  mouth  of  God.  It  is 
a  precarious  business  to  prophesy,  but  the  dominion 
of  materialistic  ways  of  life  and  modes  of  thought  has 
lasted  a  long  time,  and  is  showing  signs  of  exhaustion. 
The  tide  cannot  be  far  from  the  turn.  The  materi- 
alistic way  of  life  has  failed  to  satisfy;  and  natural- 
istic modes  of  thought  are  bankrupt.  Men  will  be- 
gin one  of  these  days  to  inquire  earnestly  about  the 
true  life. 

I  am  especially  concerned  to  emphasize  the  fact  that 
this  prospect  casts  a  great  responsibility  on  Christian 
folk.  The  Church  has  suffered  much  criticism  in  the 
course  of  these  pages,  and  there  is  no  need  to  retract 
or  qualify  any  of  it.  Nevertheless,  the  fact  remains 
that  the  Church  is  the  only  organization  in  the  world 
which  still  holds  to  a  practical  and  adequate  doc- 
trine of  the  spiritual  life.  It  needs  to  be  emancipated, 
it  is  true,  from  much  superfluous  lumber  in  the  shape 
of  obsolete  theological  traditions,  and  even  more  from 
the  entangling  bondage  of  a  materialism  that  has 
invaded  even  this  holy  ground.  The  Church,  never- 
theless, still  has  the  root  of  the  matter  in  it;  and 
alone  among  the  institutions  of  the  time  professes, 


3IO        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

\, 

f  be   it   never   so   languidly   and   never   so   huskily,   a 

I  gospel   of   spiritual   idealism.     It   is   to   the   Church, 

which  they  have  despised  and  trodden  underfoot,  that 

men  will  turn  with  their  new  hunger  for  the  living 

bread. 

It  is  hardly  necessary  to  say  that  the  situation  will 
not  be  met  by  the  promulgation  of  a  new  philosophy  or 
a  new  theology.  Intellectual  movements  in  the  top 
layers  of  society  do  not  percolate  in  any  very  effective 
way  to  the  lower  strata.  All  that  the  intellectual  un- 
rest of  the  present  time  will  do  for  the  average  man  is 
to  accentuate  his  hunger,  for  he  will  at  least,  sooner  or 
later,  hear  of  it.  The  materialism  of  the  past  century 
helped  to  confirm  the  man  in  the  street  in  hard,  materi- 
alistic ways  of  living;  and  the  current  dissolution  of 
materialism  will,  no  doubt,  in  some  measure  relax  the 
hold  upon  him  of  the  life  he  has  lived.  But  it  is 
not  by  rejecting  an  old  philosophy  or  by  accepting  a 
new  one  that  the  man  in  the  street  will  find  the  food 
that  will  satisfy  his  hunger;  for  the  philosophy  of  the 
matter  has  never  troubled  him.  The  only  power  that 
can  touch  the  man  in  the  street  is  a  power  that  can 
come  down  into  the  street;  and  the  only  power  that 
can  come  down  in  an  effectual  way  to  the  street  is  the 
life  itself — not  a  philosophy  of  it,  nor  a  theology  of 
it,  but  the  spiritual  life  in  actual  being  in  the  souls 
of  men. 

It  is  essential  not  to  overlook  the  fact  that  the 
general  revival  of  spiritual  life  and  the  social  and  na- 
tional reconstruction  that  would  follow  from  it  must 
begin  at  this  level.  It  has  already  been  pointed  out  that 
recent  research  into  early  Christian  history  establishes 
the  truth  of  the  belief  that  Christian  influence  grew; 


THE  SPIRITUAL  LIFE  AT  WORK      311 

from  the  bottom  upwards.  The  Gospel  did  not  start 
by  capturing  the  powerful  and  the  wealthy,  assuming 
that  its  influence  would  descend,  percolating  through 
the  various  social  stratifications  downwards.  On  the 
contrary,  it  first  went  into  mean  streets;  it  began  its 
operations  among  what  we  call  "  the  masses,"  the 
multitude  of  lowly,  obscure,  undistinguished  folk  who 
are,  after  all,  the  very  foundation  of  society.  In  India 
to-day,  true  to  its  genius,  the  Gospel  is  working  up- 
wards from  the  low  castes  and  the  outcasts;  and  in 
China  its  growth  is  proceeding  similarly.  If  there  is 
to  be  a  revival  of  spiritual  life  in  England,  it  must  be- 
gin as  a  contagion  among  ordinary  folk  and  work  up- 
wards from  them.  If  this  was  so  in  the  old  time 
when  the  common  people  were  dumb  and  inarticulate, 
it  is  immeasurably  truer  in  these  days  of  democracy, 
when  the  man  in  the  street  has  discovered  himself  and 
found  his  voice. 

The  revival  of  spiritual  life  must  start  through 
personal  contact;  the  leaven  and  the  meal  must  come 
together.  It  is  a  question  of  the  first  importance 
whether  modern  Christian  people  possess  the  leaven 
virtue  in  such  measure  as  to  be  really  effective.  That 
is  the  very  heart  of  the  problem.  It  is  not  a  question 
of  theological  restatement  or  of  ecclesiastical  reorgani- 
zation ;  these  are  subordinate  things ;  they  are  even  ir- 
relevancies  except  they  go  side  by  side  with  such  a  re- 
covery of  individual  spirituality  as  may,  by  its  impact 
upon  others,  reproduce  itself  in  them.  There  must  be 
sufficient  spiritual  energy  in  individual  men  and  women 
to  produce  conversion  in  those  with  whom  they  have 
to  do. 

Conversion — for  the  spiritual  life  must  start  in  a 


312        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

conversion.  The  Church  must  learn  to  familiarize  it- 
self afresh  with  the  idea  and  the  truth  of  conversion. 
It  has  been  too  ready  to  make  concessions  to  respecta- 
bility and  to  relegate  conversion — the  idea  and  the 
thing — to  the  Salvation  Army  and  others  who  go 
down  into  the  dismal  wastes  of  our  towns  and  cities. 
The  Church  must,  however,  were  it  only  to  preserve  its 
self-respect  as  an  institution  of  some  intelligence,  re- 
cover the  word  and  the  fact.  For  even  the  philoso- 
phers are  now  preaching  it.  It  is  in  some  ways  the 
pivot  of  Eucken's  teaching,  and  Bergson's  character- 
istic doctrine  of  "  new  beginnings "  interpreted  re- 
ligiously comes  to  much  the  same  thing.  The  truth  of 
conversion  is  coming  to  its  own  again,  and  the  Church 
must  habituate  itself  to  it,  and  learn  that  it  exists  in 
the  first  instance  in  order  to  produce  this  very  thing. 
Moreover,  it  has  to  learn  that  it  refers  not  only  to  the 
drunkard  and  the  harlot,  but  to  respectable  folk  living 
in  respectable  neighborhoods;  that  it  implies  not  only 
conversion  from  vice,  but  from  the  love  of  gold,  the 
love  of  pleasure,  the  love  of  fame,  the  pride  of  birth 
and  the  pride  of  place,  and  from  every  manner  of  self- 
esteem  and  worldliness.  It  is  not  to  be  regarded  as  a 
renunciation  of  one  or  two  or  more  sins  and  vices,  but 
as  a  turning  of  the  whole  life  through  and  through  in 
one  comprehensive  act  from  the  world  to  God.  It  is 
only  a  life  thus  converted  that  has  the  leaven  virtue 
and  can  by  its  impact  produce  the  conversion  of 
other  lives. 

It  should  not  be  forgotten  that  there  is  a  contagion 
of  the  spiritual  life  not  only  from  those  who  have  it  to 
those  who  have  it  not,  but  also  from  one  to  another 
among  those  who  have  it.    The  femientation  of  spirit- 


THE  SPIRITUAL  LIFE  AT  WORK     313 

uality  is  not  only  extensive  but  intensive.  As  iron 
sharpeneth  iron,  so  is  the  spiritual  life  among  men. 
We  must  live  the  spiritual  life  together  if  it  is  to  reach 
its  full  strength.  A  spiritual  fellowship  alone  can  pro- 
duce strong  effectual  spiritual  lives.  A  Christian  con- 
gregation should  be  such  a  fellowship — not  a  mere 
concourse  of  people  brought  together  by  varying  kinds 
and  degrees  of  interest  in  religion  and  its  accessories, 
but  a  body  of  men  and  women  each  severally  sworn  to 
live  out  the  spiritual  life  fearlessly  in  all  its  fulness.  It 
does  not  exist  merely  to  afford  opportunities  of  social 
worship;  nor  certainly  does  it  exist  for  the  diffusion  of 
a  vague  general  Christian  sentiment  round  about  it. 
It  was  brought  into  being  for  something  far  more  con- 
crete and  aggressive  than  that.  Its  end  is  to  be  a 
burning  centre  of  spiritual  energy  which  will  effect  a 
revolution  within  the  area  of  its  influence.  The  mem- 
bers of  a  congregation  are  brought  together  that  they 
may  pour  their  spiritual  life  into  the  common  stock,  and 
that  the  spiritual  life  of  the  whole  may  return  and 
react  upon  them,  deepening  and  strengthening  their 
own;  so  that,  by  the  continual  passing  of  spiritual  life 
to  and  from  a  common  centre,  the  light  and  the  heat 
of  the  whole  may  grow  from  more  to  more  until  it 
becomes  a  passionate  fire  which  shall  set  up  a  great 
conflagration  round  about  it.  It  is  impossible  to  cal- 
culate the  consequences  that  would  ensue  from  the 
realization  of  such  a  corporate  spiritual  life,  even  in 
the  smallest  community.  The  story  of  Antioch  still 
remains  on  record. 

2.     A  good  deal  has  been  said  concerning  the  out- 
look and  the  possibilities  of  the  spiritual  life  in  the 


314        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

course  of  the  preceding  pages;  but  much  more  might 
be  said  without  going  beyond  the  bounds  of  truth. 
Emphasis  has  been  laid  upon  the  "  creative  "  character 
of  the  spiritually  driven  moral  impulse;  but  what  is 
true  of  the  spiritual  life  on  the  moral  side  is  true  of  it 
on  other  sides.  Just  as  we  can  fix  no  terminus  to  its 
moral  achievements,  so  we  can  fix  no  limit  to  its 
achievements  in  other  directions.  This  was  the  view 
of  Jesus.  "  Nothing,"  He  said  on  one  occasion,  "  shall 
be  impossible  to  you."  And  this  saying  is  paralleled 
by  another  more  explicit  in  the  Fourth  Gospel  (xiv. 
12)  :  "  The  works  that  I  do  shall  he  do  also,  and 
greater  works  than  these  shall  he  do." 

Our  gradual  but  sure  deliverance  from  mechanistic 
conceptions  of  the  processes  of  organic  nature  is  fol- 
lowing naturally  upon  the  expansion  of  biological 
science.  We  are  seeing  more  and  more  clearly  that  it 
is  impossible  to  reduce  living  nature  to  rule,  to  fixed 
laws.  There  is  a  creative  energy  behind  it  which  is 
for  ever  producing  new  types,  new  forms  of  life;  and 
we  can  never  tell  beforehand  what  Nature's  next  ex- 
ploit will  be.  Every  step  it  takes  is  a  new  departure 
that  cannot  be  anticipated  by  the  most  extensive  knowl- 
edge of  data;  and  we  are  being  slowly  but  irresistibly 
compelled  to  the  doctrine  that  behind  natural  processes 
there  is  a  free  independent  creative  power  at  work, 
which  is  constantly  expressing  and  embodying  itself  in 
new  forms  of  life,  constantly  creating  new  vehicles  for 
its  self-fulfilment. 

The  type  of  life  which  we  call  human  is  a  product 
of  this  vital  energy,  but  it  is  distinguished  from  all 
other  life  by  its  attribute  of  personality.  Personality 
is  a  vehicle,  and  at  the  present  stage  the  supreme  vehicle 


THE  SPIRITUAL  LIFE  AT  WORK      315 

which  the  Power  of  Life  has  fashioned  for  the  purpose 
of  fulfilHng  itself.  If  the  divine  life  is  a  creative 
energy  in  nature,  how  much  more  must  it  be  so  when  it 
invests  personality?  God  does  not,  of  course,  work 
through  any  personality  against  its  will,  but  when  a 
personality  suffers  itself,  or  causes  itself  by  its  own 
choice,  to  be  invaded  and  invested  by  God,  when  the 
divine  life  enters  and  becomes  a  personal  spiritual  life 
in  the  individual,  then  it  is  become  the  perfect  instru- 
ment of  God's  purpose  of  self-fulfilment.  It  would  be 
ignorance  and  presumption  to  assign  limits  to  the 
achievements  of  a  God-invested  personality.  One  can 
set  no  limits  upon  it  which  are  not  at  the  same  time 
limits  upon  God.  ''  It  is  God,"  says  Paul,  "  that  work- 
eth  in  us,"  and  it  is  the  inevitable  corollary  of  that 
that  we  should  do  "  the  greater  works "  of  Jesus' 
promise. 

Greater  power  than  Jesus  we  cannot  possess,  for 
He  supplies  us  with  the  instance  of  a  personality  com- 
pletely invested  by  God.  The  possibility  of  the 
"  greater  works  "  lies  in  our  greater  opportunities.  Be- 
fore we  consider  this  point,  however,  it  may  be  well 
to  point  out  that  the  word  "  works  "  is  to  be  interpreted 
in  the  most  comprehensive  sense.  We  need  not  shirk 
the  conclusion  that  it  includes  miracles. 

The  denial  of  miracles  rested  upon  a  mechanistic 
conception  of  nature  which,  as  I  have  said,  we  are 
perforce  leaving  behind  us.  We  know  nowadays  how 
human  intelligence  can  direct  the  living  processes  of 
nature  and  produce  most  wonderful  results.  Mendel- 
ism,  Luther  Burbank's  successful  experiments  with 
fruit,  Poulton's  experiments  upon  butterflies,  J.  T. 
Cunningham's   experiments   upon  flounders — all   this 


3i6        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

and  a  good  deal  more  points  to  the  pliability  of  natural 
law  and  its  amenability  to  modification  by  human  in- 
telligence. Well,  then,  if  ordinary  human  intelligence 
can  so  modify  and  direct  the  operation  of  natural 
forces,  how  much  more  is  the  energy  of  the  divine  life 
working  in  personality  likely  to  do  so? 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  it  does  do  so.  Missionary  his- 
tory supplies  frequent  examples  of  modern  miracles, 
and  many  for  which  the  evidence  is  well  authenticated. 
The  records  of  miraculous  happenings  in  Christian  his- 
tory are  too  numerous,  and  in  times  of  great  spiritual 
uprising  too  consistent,  to  be  written  off  as  mere  illu- 
sions. In  any  case,  a  physical  miracle  is  a  small  thing 
by  the  side  of  those  spiritual  miracles  which  are 
manifest  in  the  conversion  of  evil  men,  and  in  the 
great  renascences  of  individual  and  corporate  life 
which  are  the  great  characteristic  facts  of  Christian 
history. 

The  "  greater  works  "  are  possible  to  us  just  because 
of  our  larger  opportunities.  For  one  thing,  we  live  in 
an  age  of  larger  knowledge,  and  a  wider  range  of 
things  is  accessible  to  us  and  amenable  to  our  operation 
upon  them.  The  level  of  human  intelligence  is  raised, 
and  we  can  approach  our  problems  without  the  handi- 
cap of  prejudice  and  ignorance  which  Jesus  encoun- 
tered. We  have,  moreover,  a  practical  acquaintance 
with  forms  of  physical  energy  that  Jesus  did  not 
possess.  We  have,  for  instance,  harnessed  electricity 
to  our  uses ;  we  have  learnt  to  manage  and  to  handle  it. 
Our  knowledge  is  constantly  growing,  and  consequently 
we  start  farther  on  than  Jesus  did.  Modern  achieve- 
ments like  wireless  telegraphy,  which  are  common- 
places to  us,  would  have  seemed  miraculous  to  our 


THE  SPIRITUAL  LIFE  AT  WORK     317 

grandfathers;  and  so  we  have  gone  on  from  age  to  age. 
So  it  comes  to  pass  that  we  set  out  upon  our  work 
in  the  world  with  many  antecedent  advantages.  Nev- 
ertheless, we  owe  it  all  to  the  spirit  of  Jesus.  If  we 
have  larger  opportunities  than  He  in  the  days  of  His 
flesh,  they  are  of  His  making;  and  when  we  do 
"  greater  works,"  they  are  at  the  last  His  works. 

Our  opportunities  are  larger  in  another  way.  Jesus 
lived  the  whole  of  His  life  in  one  little  corner  of  the 
world,  and  the  area  of  His  work  was  in  consequence 
narrow  and  circumscribed.  But  nowadays  we  all  live 
in  the  whole  world — ^the  round  earth  is  but  a  big  parish. 
The  world  is  hardly  larger  to  us  than  Palestine  was  to 
Jesus.  So  we  can  work  on  a  larger  scale,  on  a  wider 
stage.  We  can  mobilize  our  resources  more  swiftly 
and  cover  more  ground.  Our  materials  are  much 
greater  in  extent,  yet  no  less  accessible.  Nevertheless, 
all  this,  too,  we  must  trace  at  last  to  the  ever-present 
spirit  of  Jesus  Who  is  with  us  always,  "  even  unto  the 
end  of  the  world." 

Yet  it  is  true  that,  despite  our  larger  opportunities, 
we  are  not  accomplishing  the  greater  works,  and  the 
defect  is  due  to  the  inadequate  character  of  our  faith. 
We  require  a  new  quality  of  faith  in  order  to  realize 
the  power  of  the  "  greater  works  " — a  faith  which  con- 
sists in  more  than  a  general  sympathy,  a  vague  spirit 
of  assent — a  faith  which  consists  in  the  appropriation, 
as  the  deepest  truth  of  our  life,  of  the  very  deepest 
truth  of  the  life  of  Jesus — a  faith  which  consists  in  a 
thoroughgoing  renunciation  of  selfish  ambitions  and  of 
a  worldliness  which  ministers  to  the  flesh,  in  an  appre- 
hension of  and  an  investment  by  the  Spirit  of  God. 
To  such  a  faith  the  "  greater  works  "  are  still  possible. 


3i8        THE  RENASCENCE  OF  FAITH 

It  is  such  a  faith  only  that  can  restore  romance  and 
miracle  to  our  lives,  that  can  produce  that  "  superman- 
hood  "  which  "  will  stand  upon  the  earth  as  one  stands 
upon  a  footstool,  and  shall  laugh  and  reach  out  its 
hands  amidst  the  stars." 


THE   END 


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